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Jessica Malaty Rivera is an infectious disease epidemiologist and science communicator renowned for making complex public health information accessible, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic. While initially premed at USC, she pivoted to studying health promotion and disease prevention, and worked in the nonprofit sector after college. She was later recruited to research emerging biological threats at Georgetown University and simultaneously decided to pursue a master’s degree there in biohazardous threat agents and emerging infectious diseases. While she’s always loved science, she began to realize that where she truly excelled was in “speaking science.” And the deeper Rivera got into infectious disease epidemiology—whether through work or academia—the more she realized how critical the communications aspect of science was to public health. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, she joined The Atlantic to lend her expertise to the COVID Tracking Project to provide publicly available, comprehensive data on COVID