Dr. Nahid Bhadelia of BU to join White House COVID-19 Response Team

Dr. Nahid Bhadelia, an infectious diseases physician and professor at Boston University School of Medicine, has joined the White House COVID-19 Response Team as senior policy adviser for global COVID response.

Bhadelia will be taking a sabbatical from her work in Boston to pursue this role, which, in addition to being a physician and a professor, has included founding Boston University’s Center for Emerging Infectious Diseases Policy & Research (CEID), being the associate director at BU’s National Emerging Infectious Diseases Laboratories (NEIDL), and helping with the launch and development of the Special Pathogens Unit at Boston Medical Center, according to the university.

BU Vice President and Associate Provost for Research Gloria Waters, in a statement, described Bhadelia as “an international expert and leader in highly communicable and emerging infectious diseases” with “extensive clinical, field, academic, and policy experience in pandemic preparedness.”

Even before COVID-19, Bhadelia worked in pandemic preparedness in Liberia and Uganda, and she co-directs the BU and University of Liberia Emerging and Epidemic Virus Research Program. She also worked in West and East Africa during multiple outbreaks of Ebola and is a member of the World Health Organization’s Technical Advisory Group for Universal Health and Preparedness Review, which works to improve the metrics used for measuring pandemic preparedness.

“Since the beginning of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, Nahid has been a dynamic speaker, helping to effectively communicate about all aspects of the pandemic—from epidemiology to vaccination—to colleagues at Boston University and Boston Medical Center, as well as the broader US population,” Dr. David Hamer, who will be taking over as interim head of CEID, said in a statement.