Presentation: ‘Disease detective’ recounts Ebola outbreak

Emily Pieracci returns to her hometown to talk about her work “Stalking Ebola: A Disease Detective’s Journey through Sierra Leone” at 1 p.m. Friday, Oct. 30, in the East Auditorium at Washington State University Tri-Cities.

An epidemic intelligence service officer with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, she is a 1998 graduate of Hanford High and a 2009 veterinary medicine alumna of WSU.

As one of the CDC’s initial responders in summer 2014, she traced the Ebola outbreak across Sierra Leone as she taught infection prevention strategies to Ebola workers. She returned to the country in December 2014 to continue the fight against the disease.

Pieracci earned a bachelor’s degree from Western Washington University in 2002 and a master’s of public health from Johns Hopkins University in 2014.