Dennis Carroll has been appointed Chief Scientist for URC. Carroll leads URC’s efforts on global health security, including exploring ways to make health systems more resilient in the face of a public health emergency. Central to that is URC’s comprehensive approach to build sustainable, equitable, and effective systems to support quality health service delivery.
Working with local health care providers, community leaders, patient advocates, and government officials, URC strengthens health systems by developing polices, standards, guidelines, and the capacity of facility and community health workers to detect, prevent, and respond to infectious disease.
Carroll served as the Director of the U.S. Agency for International Development’s (USAID) Emerging Threats Division for more than 15 years, leading the agency’s Emerging Pandemic Threats program – a global effort to combat new disease threats before they can become significant threats to human health.
He also led USAID’s responses to the avian influenza (H5N1) outbreak of 2005, the H1N1 pandemic of 2009, and the West Africa Ebola epidemic of 2014.
Carroll serves as the Chair of the Global Virome Project Leadership Board, is a Distinguished Professor of Faculty of Medicine, Chulalongkorn University, and is a Senior Fellow at the Tufts University Center for International Law and Governance. He has a doctorate in biomedical research with a special focus in tropical infectious diseases from the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
Both the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention and USAID have recognized his work, including the 2006 USAID Science and Technology Award for his work on malaria and avian influenza, and the 2008 Administrator’s Management Innovation Award for his management of the Agency’s Avian and Pandemic Influenza program.
