Dr. Paul Biddinger holds the MGH Endowed Chair in Emergency Preparedness and is the Director of the Center for Disaster Medicine, and Vice Chairman for Emergency Preparedness in the Department of Emergency Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) in Boston. He is also the Director for Emergency Preparedness at Partners Healthcare. Dr. Biddinger additionally serves as the Director of the Emergency Preparedness Research, Evaluation and Practice (EPREP) Program at the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health, and holds appointments at Harvard Medical School and at the Chan School. Dr. Biddinger serves as a special advisor to the Massachusetts Medical Society’s Committee on Preparedness and serves as a medical officer for the MA-1 Disaster Medical Assistance Team (DMAT) in the National Disaster Medical System (NDMS) in the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).
Dr. Testa is a Senior Lecturer in Biostatistics. As an experienced public health practitioner, health outcomes researcher, evaluator, biostatistician, and the current Co-Director of the Harvard T.H. Chan EPREP program, for the past 30 years Dr. Testa has worked closely with federal, state, county, regional and local public health, community and government authorities. She previously served as the Head of the Evaluation Core for the CDC-sponsored, Harvard Academic Center for Public Health Preparedness, and as a Co-Investigator within the Harvard Preparedness and Emergency Response Research Center (PERRC) leading several national committees in bioterrorism, disaster planning and operations. She also was the Principal Investigator and Director of the Harvard Chan Preparedness and Emergency Response Learning Center (PERLC) between 2010 and 2016 working on the development of competency-based instructional development and evaluation and leading several national committees focused on public health and emergency preparedness curriculum development, training and tools. She has been the Director of the Harvard MPH Program in Quantitative Methods for nearly 30 years, mentoring over 1,200 student research projects. She is currently President of the Massachusetts Association of Health Boards working with 351 BOHs and 329 health departments.
Dr. Savoia is a Principal Scientist in Biostatistics and a medical doctor by training. During the past fifteen years, Dr. Savoia has been leading research and training activities at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health focused on public health emergency preparedness. She is the co-director of the Emergency Preparedness Research, Evaluation & Practice (EPREP) Program for which she has been P.I. of over twenty research and training projects.…
Dr. Stern is a Senior Fellow at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and professor at the Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University. Dr. Stern’s research focuses on perpetrators of violence and the possible connections between trauma and terror. She has written on terrorist groups across religions and ideologies, among them neo-Nazis, Islamists, anarchists, and white supremacists. She has also written about counter-radicalization programs for both neo-Nazi and Islamist terrorists. She has been working with a team at Boston Children’s Hospital on the risk factors for violence among Somali-refugee youth. She has held fellowships awarded by the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the Erik Erikson Institute, and the MacArthur Foundation. She was a Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellow, a National Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, and a Fellow of the World Economic Forum. Stern taught as a Lecturer at Harvard University from 1999-2015. Prior to joining the Harvard faculty, she worked in government, serving on President Clinton’s National Security Council Staff and as an analyst at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
Dr. Su is a Research Associate with backgrounds in mathematics, biostatistics, patient-centered outcomes research, and information technology. He received his ScB in mathematics from Brown University and his ScD in Biostatistics from Harvard University. Dr. Su is serving as the senior statistician and information technologist for the EPREP program. He has over 20 years of experience as a biostatistician specialized in outcome research and clinical trials. For the EPREP program, he leads the development of study designs and conducts statistical analysis of all evaluation-centered activities.
Mr. Montrond is a Fellow, he acquired his professional and knowledge in the field of public service and politics at College of the Holy Cross, MA. He obtained a master’s degree in diplomacy from the Fletcher School at TUFTS University, in Boston. During the past seven years, Mr. Montrond has committed to serving the immigrant community protecting the needs of the Cape Verdean diaspora in the international political context and in identifying strategies to address immigrants’ needs in the United States. Since 2016 he has been a deputy Member of Parliament for the Republic of Cape Verde representing the diaspora community in the Americas. Mr. Montrond is a policy analyst for the EPREP program focused on international security and the prevention of human trafficking and community violence.
Dr. Piltch-Loeb is a Fellow with the EPREP program. She received her master’s degree from the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University and her undergraduate degree from Georgetown University. She also holds a doctorate degree in Public Health, and she is also a junior research scientist at NYU’s College of Global Public Health’s Program on Population Impact, Recovery, and Resilience. Dr. Piltch-Loeb’s current research interests are in interdisciplinary public health systems improvement.
Dr. McBride is a Preparedness Fellow with the Community Safety Branch of the EPREP Program. She is also a Research Analyst with a DC-area non-profit research and analysis organization. Prior to this work she was a Postdoctoral Fellow in National Security Affairs at the U.S. Naval War College, and a Middle East intelligence analyst with the National Security Agency. She holds a Ph.D. in Religious Studies from Brown University, an M.A. in Government from Johns Hopkins University, an M.A. in Liberal Arts from the Great Books program at St. John’s College, and a B.A. in Psychology from Drew University. Her areas of expertise include terrorism, radicalization, religious and ideological violence, and theory of religion.
Dr. Daisy Muibu is a Research Fellow at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and an Assistant Professor at the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of Alabama. Her research examines the relationship between terrorism/insurgency, domestic security sector actors, the public, and civil conflict using quantitative and qualitative research approaches. The three streams of her research address the following questions or themes: (1) How can we improve…
Diána Hughes is an interviewer working with the Community Safety Branch of the EPREP Program. She graduated from Boston University in 2015, where she double-majored in International Relations and Political Science. She is currently pursuing a Masters degree in International Affairs, with a concentration in security studies at the Fredrick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University. Ms. Hughes’ research interests include extremism, violent extremism, and the psychology of extremism.
