Women of Impact: Interview with Kacey Ernst

Women of Impact: Interview with Kacey Ernst

Kacey Ernst, professor and chair of the epidemiology and biostatistics department, updates us on SCORCH, emphasizes the importance of little acts of inclusion, and breaks down what pop culture gets right and wrong about infectious outbreaks.

In the "Conversations with Women of Impact" interview series, Women of Impact award winners provide perspectives on the future of their fields, share what inspires them, and discuss what they've been up to over the last year.

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Ernst

What’s new in your world since the 2023 Women of Impact awards celebration last year? 

It has been a busy year as I stepped further into my role as Department Chair for Epidemiology and Biostatistics. I am also working with my co-mPI, Drs. Hoover and Arora to develop the Southwest Center on Resilience for Climate change and Health (SCORCH). We are excited about the direction and partnerships we are already building. We will be hosting a workshop in late August to work towards engaging more faculty across the university in identifying sustainable community-based solutions to address climate change driven health impacts.   

What kind of impact would you like to have on your field and society through your career?  

My main goal is to develop strategies to build community resilience in the face of increasing health threats. As an academic it is easy to get caught up in the need to publish and be productive from an academic standpoint, but I hope that my work will evolve to provide real benefits to identifying solutions.    

What is something you want people to know about inclusion? 

It doesn’t take a ton of resources to improve the climate of inclusion around you. Talk to people, be open, look for the folks who might not be speaking up and find ways to make your interactions include them. Yes, there are structural barriers that need to be changed that do require more resources but changing the little things can go a long way to making a work environment more supportive and welcoming.   

What are your expectations for your field and the ways in which it might grow or evolve over the next 20 years? 

For infectious disease epidemiology, I think we will continue to face more unknowns and potentially increasing emerging infectious diseases. Climate change and other anthropogenic changes are altering how we interact with animals and the environment. This can increase susceptibility and alter infectious disease emergence and transmission. We will need to be more agile and prepared, become better communicators, and have more rapid scale up of testing and deploying interventions to control transmission. 

Awardees like yourself serve as role models for future generations, but who was (and/or still is) a mentor for you? 

My PhD advisor, Mark Wilson, was probably my strongest role model. He was a keen scientist, incredibly thoughtful, and was also very humble. He never lost his curiosity or his ability to really dig in and care about the research. He has since retired from the University of Michigan, but I still get to see him at meetings sometimes and it is always great to get his perspective on my career. Internally, my former department chair Zhao Chen has been a great mentor. I think the best mentors make you think critically about your options, but don’t really tell you do x, y, or z. 

If your field has been featured in books, movies or TV shows, what did you enjoy about the representation? What didn’t you love?  

There have been numerous outbreak / pandemic movies and TV show episodes. Some of them, like Outbreak, are painful for me to watch because it is so over the top. It has a planned military response to bomb an infected area which is 1) totally unethical and 2) likely ineffective given human mobility. Contagion is a more accurate representation of what might happen. What doesn’t get represented is that responding to infectious disease outbreaks is a ton of slogging, tedious, hard work, and late nights that doesn’t make it into the movies. A few things that some of them get right are the potential for emerging infectious diseases to come from zoonotic sources, the twindemic of misinformation and disinformation that rise in times of uncertainty, and the potential disruption to normal societal functioning. The COVID-19 pandemic demonstrated that clearly.