Jennifer Nuzzo

Senior Fellow for Global Health

Profile picture

Expert Bio

Jennifer Nuzzo is a senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). She is also a professor of epidemiology and inaugural director of the Pandemic Center at Brown University School of Public Health. An epidemiologist by training, her work focuses on global health security, public health preparedness and response, and health systems resilience. Together with colleagues from the Nuclear Threat Initiative and Economist Impact, she coleads the development of the first-ever Global Health Security Index, which benchmarks one hundred ninety-five countries’ public health and health-care capacities and capabilities, their commitment to international norms and global health security financing, and socioeconomic, political, and environmental risk environments. She also directs the Outbreak Observatory, which conducts, in partnership with frontline public health practitioners, operational research to improve outbreak preparedness and response. Prior to coming to Brown, Dr. Nuzzo was an associate professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. She was also a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security.

In addition to her scholarly work, Dr. Nuzzo regularly advises national governments and for-profit and nonprofit organizations on pandemic preparedness and response, including COVID-19. She is a pandemic advisor for Impact Assets’ Stop the Spread Campaign. She is currently a member of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine’s Standing Committee for CDC Center for Preparedness and Response. She has also served as a member of the US Environmental Protection Agency’s National Drinking Water Advisory Council (NDWAC) and the NDWAC’s Water Security Working Group, and as a project advisor for the American Water Works Association Research Foundation (now called the Water Research Foundation), a primary funding organization for drinking water research in the United States.

Dr. Nuzzo regularly engages with media to educate and inform about emerging health security trends. Her articles have appeared in the New York Times, the Washington PostUSA TodayPolitico, the Hill, and the Boston Globe, and on Fox News. She was featured in Debunking Borat, a television series on Amazon Prime Video, and her work was featured on Last Week Tonight With John Oliver. She served as COVID-19 advisor for the Borat Subsequent Moviefilm.

Dr. Nuzzo received a BS in environmental sciences from Rutgers University, an SM in environmental health from Harvard University, and a DrPH in epidemiology from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

affiliations

  • Brown University, School of Public Health, professor of epidemiology and director of the pandemic center

Media Inquiries

For media inquiries, please contact [email protected].
Clear All
Regions
Topics
Type

Top Stories on CFR

Russia

The mass casualty theater attack in Moscow was a reminder that affiliates of the Islamic State have reorganized and infiltrated even powerful states.

India

With India's development continuing to gain steam, one of the biggest challenges will be to avoid the mistake that others have made when they failed to recognize their newly acquired global systemic influence and adapt accordingly. Both China and Big Tech show that it is never too early to start managing one's own rise.

United States

Atmospheric rivers are gaining in intensity across California and the western United States. Communities need to adapt to the havoc wrought by this weather phenomenon.