As part of National Public Health Week 2022, CSTE is highlighting the work of our members in applied epidemiology. Today’s focus is on CSTE member Kelly Walblay, MPH.

Until college, Kelly Walblay had no idea what epidemiology was. That changed quickly.

As an undergraduate, Walblay knew she wanted to work in health care, just not exactly in which discipline. After a guidance counselor introduced her to public health, she took a chance and signed up for an internship in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Along with her fellow interns, she spent time with an underserved population within the city as a health consultant, focusing on infant care, sexual health and immunizations.

“We just set up a table in this community and people came and asked questions,” Walblay said. “Seeing this community care about their health and genuinely wanting to know answers to their questions was really cool for me. At that moment, I thought: ‘Oh we can really address some of these gaps that we’re seeing in public health knowledge.’”

From her internship to her master’s degree thesis, and onto her professional career, reaching out into the community has echoed throughout Kelly’s work as an applied epidemiologist. A fitting connection as today’s National Public Health Week theme is Community Collaboration and Resilience.

“[Argentina] was the moment where I thought ‘I really want to do something like this.’”

Ms. Walblay pursued a master's degree in public health specializing in epidemiology at the University of Michigan. She worked with a professor who did cohort studies on mosquito-born diseases in Nicaragua. Once again, Kelly grabbed her passport and went abroad to help a community in need.

“When I got to Nicaragua, it was right at the time Zika was appearing,” she added. “My job was to add Zika to the existing study and to build up a surveillance system to track cases in the pediatric population.”

The experience led to her thesis, highlighting this experience of tracking pediatric Zika and looking at factors associated with Zika virus infection, such as demographic and socioeconomic.

After earning her master’s, Ms. Walblay was accepted into CSTE’s Applied Epidemiology Fellowship (AEF) and was stationed at the Illinois Department of Health (IDPH). When her fellowship ended in 2019, she began a job at the Chicago Department of Health. A few months later, the COVID-19 pandemic began.

She had a front row view of the early weeks of the pandemic, as the first person-to-person COVID-19 transmission in the United States happened in the Chicago area. It was there that Kelly’s team, along with colleagues from IDPH, Cook County and CDC met to figure out how to identify high-risk contacts that were exposed and protect the health of their community.

“The pandemic is really when it [my role] ‘got real’ – Even though we had all these great minds and everyone was bringing something to the table, we were still figuring it out,” she said.

Subsequently during the pandemic, Walblay worked in the health care settings unit and tracked the COVID-19 cases occurring among staff and residents in skilled nursing facilities.

“My job was to track outbreaks that happened and work closely with a team of infection preventionists to try to reach out and help with infection control,” she said.

Kelly and her colleagues established strong relationships at these skilled nursing facilities through follow-up calls, site visits and biweekly roundtable video calls. The facilities were typically dealing with everything from staffing issues to a lack of PPE and internal testing. She said the key was letting them know they were there to help.

“We’re not regulatory and we’re not coming in to cite or fine them. We are genuinely there to ask how we can help support [their facility] as a health department and ask what they need,” Walblay said. “During that time, rules and guidance for things like visitation and testing were changing constantly.” We stayed very connected with our facilities.”

During this time, Ms. Walblay said it was also important to maintain a work life balance and a sense of self care. She points to small things such as turning off email notifications and organizing a virtual board game night with colleagues as ways to boost resiliency.

“You have to remind yourself and your team that you’re doing the best you can and that we are people living through this pandemic and not just public health professionals.”

In Kelly Walblay’s short yet eventful career as an epidemiologist, from Argentina to Nicaragua to Chicago, she has seen the importance of community collaboration and resilience firsthand. Her advice to aspiring epis to tackle community collaboration is, above all else, be a clear communicator.

“As an epi, it’s very important to get the message across of what you’re trying to say with your data. So, I think constantly practicing putting it in layman’s terms is a skill you need to master.”

And her advice for resilience?

“It’s vital to maintain a sense of self-care”

Kelly Walblay, MPH is a Senior Epidemiologist at the Chicago Department of Public Health working in infectious disease areas. Kelly is also an alumnus of CSTE’s Applied Epidemiology Fellowship (AEF).