Monica Schoch-Spana, a medical anthropologist, is a senior scholar with the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security and a senior scientist with the Department of Environmental Health and Engineering at the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health. For over 20 years, she has researched public health emergency management, focusing on community resilience, behaviorally realistic emergency plans, public engagement in disaster planning, post-epidemic recovery, and crisis and emergency risk communication. She has also worked diligently to translate scholarly research into actionable recommendations for policymakers and practitioners, including most recently as co-principal investigator for CommuniVax–a national ethnographic research coalition whose expert advisory group and six local teams are partnering with communities of color to tackle COVID-19 vaccine access and acceptance issues and to put equity at the center of the pandemic recovery process. National advisory roles include the Homeland Security Subcommittee of the Board of Scientific Counselors for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the Resilient America Roundtable of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, which she formerly co-chaired. From 2003-2017, Schoch-Spana worked at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center's Center for Health Security. She also previously worked at the Johns Hopkins University Center for Civilian Biodefense Strategies, starting in 1998. She received her PhD in cultural anthropology from Johns Hopkins University.