2. Dr. Ezra J. Barzilay hails from
Greece and is a pediatrician by
training. He is currently
serving as the Country Director
for the CDC office in Kyiv,
Ukraine, leading the efforts to
respond the COVID-19 threat
in the country, and to stem
Ukraine’s HIV/AIDS epidemic.
Dr. Barzilay began his career at
CDC in 2004 as an Epidemic
Intelligence Service officer.
He also served as the
lead epidemiologist for the
Health System Reconstruction
_Office and served as the Deputy Incident –––Manager for the CDC’s
2016-2017 Zika Response, the 2014-2015 Ebola Response and the
2010-2011 Haiti Cholera Response. Prior to that, Dr. Barzilay led
the U.S. National Surveillance Team for Enteric Diseases in the
National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases at
CDC.
Fluent in seven languages, Dr. Barzilay’s field experience
includes disease surveillance, global public health interventions,
disaster response, outbreak investigations, and serving as a trainer
and expert consultant for the World Health Organization. He
is a Commissioned Officer of the US Public Health Service, serving
in the rank of Captain (O6) and holds academic
appointments as Adjunct Associate Professor of Pediatrics at
the Uniformed Services University of Health Sciences and as
Clinical Assistant Professor of Pediatrics at Emory University
School of Medicine. Dr. Barzilay is a past INSPIRE Fellow of the
Institute for Global Leadership at Tufts University during the EPIIC
year on Global Health an Security, and is a recipient of the Light On
The Hill Award presented to notable Tufts alumni.
Dr. Maimuna (Maia) Majumder
is a member of the ladder-rank
faculty at the Computational
Health Informatics Program
(CHIP) based out of Harvard
Medical School and Boston
Children’s Hospital and a recent
graduate of the Engineering
Systems program at MIT’s
Institute for Data, Systems, and
Society (IDSS). In between her
graduate studies and her current
position at CHIP, Maia spent
aa–––year at the Health Policy Data Science lab at Harvard Medical School’s
Health Care Policy department as a postdoctoral fellow.
During her masters and doctoral studies at MIT, she was funded through a
graduate fellowship at HealthMap computational epidemiology
group. Prior to Maia’s arrival at MIT, she earned a Bachelors of
Science in Engineering Science (with a concentration in Civil and
Environmental Engineering) and a Masters of Public Health in
Epidemiology and Biostatistics at Tufts University.
While at Tufts, Maia was a member of the 2012-13 EPIIC Colloquium
on Global Health and Security, and a field researcher with the
International Centre for Diarrheal Disease Research, Bangladesh
(ICDDR,B), where she worked with clinic patients (and their data) to learn
how to better tell their stories. Her current research interests involve
probabilistic modeling, data science, and “systems epidemiology” in
the context of public health, with a focus on causal inference for
infectious disease surveillance using digital disease data (e.g. search
trends; news and social media). She also enjoys exploring novel
techniques for data procurement, writing about data for the general
public, and creating meaningful data visualizations. As of January 2019,
Maia has been engaged in pandemic response efforts and is a leading
expert in COVID-19 epidemiology.
3. Born in Volos, Greece, Alexandros Michailidis works
as freelance photojournalist, and as an accredited
photojournalist for the European Union, covering areas of
Central and Western Europe, Turkey, and Greece, and
specializing in humanitarian crises.
His pictures of the Greek economic crisis, European
Politics and the migration crisis have been widely published
by major news and media outlets, newspapers, and
journals, including front page coverage in the NYT, Le
Monde, Time Magazine.
Throughout the COVID-19 Pandemic, Alexandros has been
investigating and documenting both areas of public life
(essential workers, daily life / new normality) as well as cross
sections of the healthcare sector (the view from inside ICUs,
mortuary rooms and makeshift cemeteries in urban areas,
since local cemeteries were closed due to overcapacity).
Dimitrios Bouras has been
working since 1981 as a
photographer/ documentarian
and follows an
anthropological approach to
his investigation and research
studies. He is a regular
photojournalist contributor,
under an alias, and his images
have been printed by
international media outlets,
have won numerous awards
and have been exhibited
extensively internationally.
Since 2010, Dimitrios has
–––––focused his research studies on epidemics and the epidemic process. His 2010-2013
work, including the results of a research study among homeless IDU populations in
Athens, was presented at Tufts IGL’s EPIIC Symposium (Feb. 2013), at a
CRASSH conference, at the University of Cambridge, titled “Ethics and Aesthetics
in Epidemiological Photography” (Sept. 2013) and during a series of lectures
and presentations in Academic Institutions in Greece, as well as in several
exhibitions.
Since 2013, Dimitrios started shifting his focus to healthcare: he investigated the
TB & MDR-TB Epidemic in Ukraine, the outcome of which, culminated in the
creation of a documentary titled “Forgotten Youth, Ukraine” commissioned
by ThreeSixZero, Singapore, and screened by NG Asia. (Human Concerns Award
at New York TV & Film Festival in 2019).
During the recent and mandatory “COVID-19 lockdown” in Greece, Dimitrios
followed and documented streetwork outreach among vulnerable populations
in Athens, under the auspices of the “Aristotelis” program, an effort to
achieve HIV viral suppression via testing and mapping of vulnerable populations.
