Monica Schoch-Spana, PhD, CPH, a medical anthropologist and public health researcher, is Professor of Community Health in the Department of Health and Behavioral Sciences and the Director for the Community Health Degree program. For over 25 years, she has conducted research on public health emergency management, focusing on community resilience, behaviorally realistic emergency planning, public engagement in disaster planning, and crisis and emergency risk communication. She has also worked diligently to translate scholarly research into actionable recommendations for policymakers and practitioners, including as Principal Investigator for CommuniVax – a national rapid ethnographic research coalition that partnered with local 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 US Environmental Protection Agency and the Resilient America Roundtable of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, which she formerly co-chaired. She worked previously at the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health with positions in the Department of Environmental Health and Engineering and the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. She holds a PhD in cultural anthropology from Johns Hopkins University and she is certified in public health by the National Board of Public Health Examiners (NBPHE).