Dr. Susan Monarez

Actually, I stood up a Center for Innovation there first because what I saw is that there was an opportunity to bring much greater science and technology and data innovation to the populations that had been untouched yet with this level of innovation.

And so that was my first real opportunity to try to innovate in sort of a historic and working in

under-resourced and rural populations and trying to advance health innovation was probably one of the greatest challenges that I've, that I, that I had because it's, it's, there's just such a tension between traditional, you know, how do you provide care and actually innovating that.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yep.

Um, that was, that was absolutely wonderful.

Um, you know, uh, Renee Wagner's then was a director and we had the duty to stand up, you know, the, um, the, uh, the ARPA, the DARPA version of, of, you know, and, uh, it was fantastic.

Yep, there were five ongoing outbreaks.

Yeah, we had Ebola in Marburg in Africa.

We had TB in Kansas.

We had H5N1 where we really didn't know what the arc was going to look like.

And then we had the emerging measles outbreak that was starting in Texas.

And yeah, it was, I mean, it was everything that CDC, you know, is expected to be able to handle.

And I was, I jumped right in and, you know, really incredible team.

amazing team down there as such professionals.

You know, I would, I would ask, um, you know, daily, hourly, what are we doing here?

What are we doing here?

What are we doing here?

And what I would hear under Dr. Monroe is we have this, this is what we do.