SEVEN Talk, by Bruce Gellin ’77: “Serendipitous Lessons”

Catalyze

Today’s episode is a recording of a SEVEN Talk from the 2022 Alumni Forum. This talk, given by Bruce Gellin ’77, is entitled, “Serendipitous Lessons.” Bruce is the Chief of Global Public Health Strategy at The Rockefeller Foundation.
You can watch all of the SEVEN Talks on our YouTube channel.
More about Bruce
Bruce Gellin ’77 has pursued a career that’s blended medicine, science, policy, and public health with a focus on infectious diseases and pandemics. He traces all of this to his days at Carolina, where he crafted an interdisciplinary studies program in human biology. When he took a year off in the middle of medical school at Cornell (’83) as a Luce Scholar in the Philippines, he came back with a clearer picture where he was headed.
After completing a residency in internal medicine at Vanderbilt (’86), he became a disease detective in CDC’s Epidemic Intelligence Service that put him on the ground investigating outbreaks from Leavenworth Penitentiary (a foodborne outbreak of “homemade” ice cream) to New Zealand (an epidemic of bacterial meningitis).

His career in vaccines and vaccine-preventable diseases included work at Johns Hopkins and NIH and as a Warren Weaver Fellow at the Rockefeller Foundation. In 2002, he moved to Washington as an Assistant Secretary for Health and Director of the National Vaccine Program Office at the Department of Health and Human Services.
After 15 years in that post (SARS, MERS, Bird Flu, H1N1, and a growing anti-vaccine movement), he was the president of global immunization at the Sabin Vaccine Institute until last year, when he returned to the Rockefeller Foundation as Chief, Global Public Health Strategy, where he is overseeing their Global Vaccine Initiative and their recently launched Pandemic Prevention Institute.

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Catalyze is hosted and produced by Sarah O’Carroll for the Morehead-Cain Foundation, home of the first merit scholarship program in the United States and located at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. You can let us know what you thought of the episode by finding us on Twitter or Instagram at @moreheadcain or you can email us at [e-mail].