Since 2016, Dr Katharine Sturm-Ramirez has served as resident advisor from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to the US President’s Malaria Initiative in Senegal. In this position, she works with colleagues at the US Agency for International Development (USAID) to help design, implement, monitor, and evaluate key malaria prevention and control activities in close coordination with Senegal’s National Malaria Control Program and national and international partners, including non-governmental and private sectors. Dr Sturm-Ramirez’s main scientific and policy interests are infectious diseases of global public health importance and issues of capacity building in low- and middle-income countries.

Dr Sturm-Ramirez joined the US government in 2007, as a Science Policy Fellow for the American Association for the Advancement of Science. She later served as a program officer at the Fogarty International Center of the National Institutes of Health where most of her activities centered on managing infectious diseases research activities, coordinating research training grants, and providing technical advice on influenza-related policy issues. From 2010–2016, Dr Sturm-Ramirez served as the CDC’s influenza program director for Bangladesh and headed the Respiratory Viruses Research Group at the International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research, Bangladesh (icddr,b). The primary objectives of the research unit were to perform seasonal and novel influenza surveillance among human populations and at the animal-human interface, to estimate the disease burden of respiratory viruses, and to pilot and evaluate novel interventions. She also served on the Biosafety Committee and Institutional Review Board of the iccdr,b. She also provided technical advice to Bangladesh’s Ministry of Health and Family Welfare on seasonal influenza, Avian influenza, and pandemic influenza surveillance and outbreak response, pandemic preparedness and containment activities for emerging viruses.

Dr Sturm-Ramirez earned a bachelor’s degree in Biology from Swarthmore College and a Doctor of Philosophy in Biological Sciences in Public Health from Harvard University, where her thesis work focused on the molecular epidemiology of HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases among commercial sex-workers in Dakar, Senegal. She completed post-doctoral training at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and at St Jude Children’s Research Hospital.