Faculty Expert Profile

Emily Gurley is an epidemiologist with a 20-year career focused on infectious disease transmission, developing novel surveillance and outbreak investigation methods, and studies to develop and test interventions for prevention. She has broad experience in the study of zoonotic infections, arboviruses, and vaccine-preventable diseases using a One Health approach. In 2020 Gurley was awarded the Bloomberg School's Shikani/El-Hibri Prize for Discovery and Innovation for her work in the COVID-19 pandemic response, including establishing the Novel Coronavirus Research Compendium (NCRC) and leading courses in contact tracing that have been used worldwide.

Gurley spent 12 years at the international research organization ICDDR,B in Dhaka, Bangladesh, where she served as the director of their Emerging Infections Programme. She is the co-director for the Child Health and Mortality Prevention Surveillance (CHAMPS) project in Bangladesh, in which multidisciplinary teams use minimally invasive tissue sampling to identify the etiology of stillbirths and child deaths. She also leads studies on the ecology, transmission, and prevention of Nipah virus, an emerging bat-borne zoonosis that can be transmitted from person-to-person.