Guest Author
Mark Sotir, Ph.D. M.P.H. works as a staff epidemiologist with the OutbreakNet team, Enteric Diseases Epidemiology Branch at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). His primary duties involve coordinating and supervising national and regional outbreak investigations involving enteric pathogens, typically Salmonella and Shiga-toxin-producing Escherichia coli. During the past two years with CDC, he has coordinated several of these multi-state efforts, including Salmonella Wandsworth infections in children linked to a vegetable-coated snack food, Salmonella Java infections associated with exposure to small turtles, and E. coli O157:H7 outbreaks linked to ground beef and raw cookie dough. Before his current position, Mark was the vectorborne disease epidemiologist for the Wisconsin Division of Public Health, worked in Zambia as part of the WHO Stop Transmission of Polio (STOP) program, and completed the CDC Epidemic Intelligence Service (EIS) program as a state officer in Wisconsin. Mark completed his a doctoral degree in epidemiology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, his masters in epidemiology at Emory University, and a bachelors degree in biology and chemistry at Tufts University.