Dr. Jennifer Verani

Jennifer Verani MD, MPH leads the Global Disease Detection, Epidemiology and Surveillance Program for the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Kenya. She is a pediatrician, epidemiologist, and a Captain in the United States Public Health Service. She obtained her medical degree from Harvard Medical School, MPH in International Health from the Harvard School of Public Health, and undergraduate degree in International Development from Brown University. Dr. Verani completed her residency training at the Children’s Hospital of New York-Columbia, where she served in the community pediatrics track. Prior to her career in medicine, Dr. Verani worked for several years on public health programs in Latin America. In 2006 Dr. Verani came to CDC as an Epidemic Intelligence Service (EIS) officer in the Parasitic Diseases Branch, where she conducted research on schistosomiasis, lymphatic filariasis, soil-transmitted helminths, guinea worm, Chagas disease, and Acanthamoeba. Following EIS, she joined the Respiratory Diseases Branch to work on the prevention of pneumonia and neonatal sepsis. In that position Dr. Verani collaborated on studies of the effectiveness and impact of vaccines against Streptococcus pneumoniae and Haemophilus influenzae type B in several countries in Latin America and Africa, and provided technical assistance for respiratory disease surveillance in low-resource settings. She led the revision of CDC guidelines for the prevention of neonatal group B streptococcal (GBS) disease and a multi-state investigation of the remaining burden of early-onset GBS disease in the United States. In her current position Dr. Verani leads the Population-Based Infectious Disease Surveillance platform in Kibera and Asembo, and is establishing a network of Acute Febrile Illness sentinel surveillance sites across Kenya. Dr. Verani is also an Adjunct Assistant Professor of Pediatrics at Emory University School of Medicine, where she helps to train interns who serve patients at an urban primary care clinic.