The COVID-19 Pandemic: Public Health Surveillance in the Setting of Evolving Data Needs
Speaker: Adi Gundlapalli, CDC
Abstract: This talk will describe priorities and strategies for responding to public health surveillance needs for COVID-19, highlight some of the opportunities and challenges faced at the national level, and describe evolving data needs through the COVID-19 pandemic and strategies to keep pace.
Bio: Dr. Gundlapalli is an infectious diseases physician and informatician who serves as the Senior Advisor for Data Readiness and Response in the Office of Public Health Data, Surveillance, and Technology at CDC. In this role, he provides strategic informatics leadership and advisement to advance the nation's evolving public health data and response needs. Since 2020, he has led task forces for the CDC's national responses to COVID-19 and Mpox, and preparedness for Marburg. As task force lead, he oversaw initiatives aimed at advancing CDC's data acquisition, analytics, and visualization capabilities to increase understanding of outbreaks and trends using traditional, new, and non-traditional data sources.
Before coming to the CDC in August 2019, Dr. Gundlapalli was the Chief Health Informatics Officer for the VA Salt Lake City Health Care System and infectious diseases staff physician in Utah. He was a tenured professor of Internal Medicine at the University of Utah School of Medicine and a physician at the University of Utah Hospitals and Clinics. He is board-certified in internal medicine, infectious diseases, and clinical informatics. His clinical and research interests include infectious diseases, clinical immunology, bio-surveillance (and biodefense), preparedness for public health emergencies, infection prevention and hospital epidemiology, and healthcare for vulnerable populations.
Dr. Gundlapalli received his medical degree from the Madras Medical College in Madras (now called Chennai), India. He received further training at the University of Connecticut Health Center where he earned a Ph.D. in immunology and completed an internal medicine residency. In Utah, he completed a three-year clinical and research fellowship in infectious diseases and a master's degree (with thesis) in biomedical informatics at the University of Utah School of Medicine.