By Hannah Frazier

If you were to hear the word epidemiology, would you know what it is? If you said “What’s that?” then you are just like most people Daniela Ledesma told about her career path before the global pandemic. Epidemiology is “the branch of medicine which deals with the incidence, distribution, and possible control of diseases and other factors relating to health.” Clearly, this is extremely relevant to us in the midst of a pandemic and epidemiologists deserve recognition during this time.

Daniela Ledesma graduated from Tempe Prep in 2016 and has come a long way since then. She works as a Program Manager for the ASU Covid-19 Case Investigation and Community Response Team. Partnering with the Maricopa County Department of Public Health (MCDPH), this team conducts case investigations and contact tracing for confirmed Covid-19 cases all over the country.

Since Arizona became a hotspot for the pandemic during the summer, Daniela’s team recruited, trained, and mobilized a student-volunteer workforce of over 200 individuals to operate in a virtual call center in hopes to ultimately create a containment plan.

Daniela elaborates, saying, “Our volunteers perform case investigations 7 days a week where they call cases with Covid-19, ask them questions about their symptoms and possible exposures, offer community and social support resources as well as isolation and quarantine guidance, and very importantly, collect close contacts who may have been exposed to Covid-19.” She says that the first step in the public health initiative is notifying close contacts of their exposure and asking them to quarantine.

When she is not working, Daniela is a full-time graduate student studying her Masters of Health Science in Epidemiology at Johns Hopkins University. Daniela has been attending her classes virtually at the Bloomberg School of Public Health. She says, “It has been really cool to study at the nation’s top school of public health and then at the same time, actually get to apply what I’m learning to real public health practice at my job.”

As one of the program data managers for the ASU Covid-19 Case Investigation and Community Response Team, Daniela spends a lot of time reviewing case investigations, analyzing trends, identifying areas for enhanced training, putting together daily reports for the data relating to case numbers, and working closely with the people at MCDPH. She also works as part of a public health communications subcommittee which puts together “easy-to-read materials such as infographics or FAQs on Covid-19 prevention and control strategies, and CDC guidance.”

On top of all of this, Daniela is on a research projects subcommittee for which she is “in the process of writing and revising some manuscripts for peer-reviewed publication in health journals.”

Despite the entirely virtual operations Daniela is grateful for the incredible opportunity she has gotten to witness the hard work people have been putting in to meet the demand. She says, “It has been very rewarding to see the impact that our innovative, multidisciplinary partnership has had in working with communities across Arizona and supporting individuals affected by Covid-19, as well as providing a real unique practical learning experience to student volunteers interested in public health careers.”

Daniela discusses how her high school career taught her meaningful skills and brought her to where she is today. She says, “Its [Tempe Prep’s] mission to academically and socially support its students has had a lasting impact, leading me to find a career where I am able to use my skill sets to collaborate and offer solutions that can improve the health, well-being, and quality of life of others… While I may not be reading classical literature such as Homer’s The Iliad regularly anymore, I still find value from my high school experiences that taught me how to critically think and analyze, how to collaborate and work on a team, and how to implement creative solutions to problems.”

She remarks on TPA’s cultivation for her love of learning and curiosity, going on to say that she feels very fortunate to have continued her education at Barrett, the Honors College at ASU and graduating with a bachelor’s degree in Global Health last spring.

Daniela has wanted to work in the health care field from a young age. While she did not know what she wanted to study specifically at first, she eventually fell in love with the “discovery of public health and in particular, understanding the distribution and patterns of diseases and how they vary geographically and socially.”

Daniela emphasizes how many real-world applications there are to the data that epidemiologists collect, especially now including prevention strategies such as vaccines, public health interventions to disadvantaged or rural communities, and even policy legislation. Daniela hopes that high school students will see how unlimited the options are in the medical field and that there is more to the field than clinical practice. She says, “Rather, there are lots of paths out there that all work closely together with a common goal of ‘Protecting Health, Saving Lives-Millions at a Time’ as Johns Hopkins mission states.”

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