Preparing for Disaster

Throughout Jeff Freeman’s career, he has led countless scientists and public health personnel in supporting responses to pandemics, violent conflicts, and major health crises. Last May, he stepped into his biggest role yet as director and special assistant to the president for the National Center for Disaster Medicine and Public Health (National Center), a component of the Uniformed Services University in Bethesda, Maryland.

After Hurricane Katrina, the National Center was created as both a federal organization and an academic center to advance the United States’ medical and public health readiness for health emergencies, from natural disasters to terrorist attacks. It was founded by five federal executive departments: Defense, Homeland Security, Health and Human Services, Veterans Affairs, and Transportation. Today, the National Center is governed by a board of advisers comprised of senior executives from each of those five original founding departments plus the Department of State.

Among Freeman’s top priorities is launching a national initiative focused on “building on the fly by design” to help the country rapidly build capacity above and beyond what can be maintained before and after disaster-level events. In a nutshell, he’s creating an agile response plan for any large-scale, worst-case scenario event where the typical rules and assumptions may not apply, and the medical and public health mission trumps all.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, while leading the Disaster Response Corps at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL), Freeman managed the mobilization of several hundred scientists under the White House COVID-19 Task Force. Freeman and team helped the government build an analytic infrastructure to operationalize patient-level data being sent to the government en masse from hospitals across the country, which was not common practice before the pandemic.

“Short of a Congressional mandate, this was not something most health surveillance experts believed was possible prior to the pandemic. Our failure to imagine a more extreme scenario where the rules no longer applied meant it took months to build the necessary infrastructure to receive and act on that data,” he says.

With his new initiative, Freeman hopes the nation will be better prepared for the next big thing.

While many would feel overwhelmed by the magnitude of responsibility that comes with leading a nation in preparing for disasters, Freeman thrives on the stress and pressure.

“The pressure of an event and the limited time and resources available bring focus to what you can do in the moment. Focusing on the important things is also how I live my life,” says Freeman, who was born close to Fort Moore (previously called Fort Benning) near Columbus, Georgia, and grew up in a military family.

Freeman began his career serving others in the humanitarian sector, working in areas of violent conflict, such as Sudan and its surrounding nations, before applying to Rollins to pursue his master of public health. “I needed additional education to be as useful as I wanted to be at my job,” he says. “So, I left my work to pursue a degree and pick up new skills.”

He credits Rollins and two advisers in particular as the catalysts for the public health successes and opportunities that led to all of the jobs that followed. Roger Rochat, MD, professor emeritus, played an instrumental role in Freeman’s success at Emory through his early support, mentorship, and friendship. Additionally, former academic adviser Theresa Nash hired him to help coordinate the graduate certificate in humanitarian emergencies.

During that experience, he got to know staff members at the Emergency Response and Recovery Branch of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and subsequently landed an internship there that led to a fellowship. Ultimately, the fellowship helped get him into his environmental health and engineering PhD program at Johns Hopkins University. While working on his PhD, he was hired as a researcher at Johns Hopkins’ Center for Humanitarian Health. Upon graduation in 2017, Johns Hopkins APL recruited and tasked him with building a disaster response program for the lab, which became APL’s Disaster Response Corps.

“Inherently, the decisions you make in humanitarian situations and disasters count for a lot,” says Freeman. “Being at the National Center today feels meaningful, and it has a mission I can feel good about. That’s really all you can hope for in a public health career.”