Our Team

Dr. Chu received her PhD degree from the University of Hawaii at Manoa with specialties in tropical medicine and medical microbiology. Dr. Chu’s public health career was with the CDC where she served in multiple roles including being the Director of the CDC’s system-wide laboratory enterprise. After leaving CDC, she returned to Colorado and now holds a clinical professor appointment at the Colorado School of Public Health. Concurrently, she works as senior technical consultant for USAID and WHO. Among her multiple roles for CDC, Dr. Chu was assigned to the WHO participating in the Global Outbreak and Response team, deploying for multiple outbreak responses to SARS, viral hemorrhagic fevers, pandemic influenza and natural disasters. She also led the biosafety and laboratory network activities for the WHO International Health Regulations team. She was assigned as the assistant director for public health to the White House during 2014-2015 where she was an integral part of the President’s Ebola Task Force and coordinated the national reform on the Select Agent Rule. Currently, she is working with UNICEF/USAID on the delivery of Zika virus point of care diagnostics and with WHO on improving protection for healthcare workers fighting high threat pathogens (Ebola, influenza and respiratory diseases). Since February 12, 2020, Dr. Chu has joined the WHO experts group for infection control and prevention for the COVID-19 epidemic.

Alexa is the ColoradoSPH Center for Global Health’s global health program coordinator. For the past five years, Alexa has worked on various national and international public health projects. Much of her work has been advocating for equitable healthcare from an epidemiological lens in low-resource communities.

Dr. Jaenisch is an Infectious Disease Epidemiologist and Clinical Scientist. For the last 15 years, he has coordinated multicentric observational clinical research projects on arbovirus infections like Dengue or Zika.

His research was instrumental to provide key evidence for the WHO Dengue classification of 2009. After that, he focused on warning signs for severe Dengue and on standardized severe disease endpoints in Dengue. When the Zika epidemic hit Latin America in 2016, he was able to use the existing network of partners to mount a research response against Zika.

Dr. Jaenisch is involved in large multicentric pregnant women and children cohorts in Latin America as well as in Data Sharing and Harmonization of Infectious Disease cohorts, building on the ongoing Zika birth cohorts.

Dr Jaenisch was trained as a Medical Doctor in Germany, has obtained a PhD in International Health at Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health, and has worked in Tropical Medicine and Global Health at Heidelberg University Hospital from 2005-2019. He was recently recruited as the Director of the new Arbovirus Research Consortium (ARC), located at the Center for Global Health at the Colorado School of Public Health.

Dr. Lamb's research and public health practice are focused on improving the health of children living both in the United States and in resource-poor countries. Before joining the faculty at the Colorado School of Public Health at the CU Anschutz Medical Campus in 2011, she was an epidemic intelligence service officer with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, stationed at the National Center for Health Statistics in Hyattsville, MD, where she investigated infectious disease outbreaks and conducted research on childhood obesity. She currently is an epidemiologist at the Center for Global Health, where she works on research and public health projects in Guatemala and India, and serves as the director of educational experiences, linking students with global health projects and mentoring junior global health researchers. She also teaches graduate courses on global health, vaccines, and epidemiology methods, and is the director of the DrPH in Epidemiology program at the Colorado School of Public Health.

Dr. Olson is an associate professor in the Section of Infectious Diseases (ID) at the University of Colorado (CU) School of Medicine, with secondary appointments in the Department of Epidemiology within the Colorado School of Public Health and the Department of Bioengineering in the CU School of Engineering. His research focuses on novel approaches to emerging infectious diseases (EID) surveillance, including field-based molecular diagnostics, measuring the clinical and socioeconomic impact of EIDs in resource-limited populations, as well as the immunologic response, and assessing the benefit of community-based interventions such as vaccines. He is the co-director for research at the CU-associated Center for Human Development in Southwest Guatemala, and he leads several cohort studies with a number of collaborators from CU, Colorado State University, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and elsewhere. Dr. Olson teaches in the Colorado School of Public Health and is the Global Health Fellowship director.

Olivia is a professional research assistant at the Center for Global Health. Olivia received a Bachelor of Science degree from Colorado State University. Olivia studied in the U.K. at the University of Oxford, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, and received a Master in Public Health from Glasgow Caledonian University.