His work once forecasted toxicity in fish; now, John Olmstead, MPH, is working within the Georgia Department of Public Health (GDPH) preparing the public health game plan for a much larger “pond”: next summer’s FIFA World Cup tournament.

As the Analytic Team Lead for DPH within the Epidemiology Division and the 2025 CSTE Fellowship Alumnus Award winner, we caught up with John to chat about his journey from chemistry to epidemiology and how his team is working along other GDPH partners in Applied Epidemiology, Preparedness, Laboratory, and more as a component of the overall DPH initiative to ready Georgia for an influx of thousands of international visitors and fans.

John earned his bachelor’s in chemistry and initially pursued a career in that field, but something was missing: a need to connect science to people's lives. This led him to shift his focus to public health, right around the time he was working with statistical models that predicted chemical toxicity.

“We worked on statistical machine learning models and one of the main outputs was how many fish die at this level of chemical exposure,” Olmstead recalls. “And I thought, I would really love to see the human impact of this.”

This quest led him to the CSTE Applied Epidemiology Fellowship, an experience he found invaluable for its dual perspective. Based on CDC's Epidemic Intelligence Service model, his fellowship was split between CDC and GDPH.

“The really cool thing about that project was that I was able to see it from both perspectives: the federal and the state,” he said, adding that it taught him the art of reconciling different priorities, a skill that directly informs his current role.

After completing the fellowship, Olmstead took a position at GDPH, first as a biostatistician and now as the Analytic Team Lead for a new team focused on data modernization and building analytic capacity at DPH. And with Atlanta slated to host several World Cup matches next summer, his work has big implications.

For an event like the World Cup, public health monitoring is crucial. A sudden influx of visitors can quickly lead to outbreaks of infectious diseases, spikes in emergency medical calls, or other incidents that require a rapid response. To track these threats, Olmstead’s team supports applied epidemiologists and associated partners to monitor data streams like syndromic surveillance from hospitals, emergency call logs, and wastewater data. Their challenge is maintaining this watch efficiently, especially when matches occur on weekends and evenings. “My main concern usually is how can my team free up time for our applied epidemiologists to do more with their time?” he explained. Their solution to this round-the-clock need is an automated report for leadership. “We came up with a way to create a report that you can read in 30 seconds.”

This demands a focused approach to data, where not every stream makes the cut. “One of my main concerns is that any data set that we actually include is validated and actionable for follow-up,” Olmstead notes. “If you're looking at something for a few seconds and there's a chance that it could be misinterpreted, we don't want to include that.”

For John, the reward lies not in the events, but in the daily victories of problem-solving with his team. “Day to day, I really just enjoy talking and working with my coworkers and helping solve problems,” he said. “And I like it when a month from that time they say that they have a different problem, because to me that means that that one was solved and we're moving forward. It’s motivating.”

It’s this mindset that ensures Georgia is not just preparing for a few soccer matches, but building a resilient future where data leads the way.

CSTE congratulates John once again on winning the 2025 Fellowship Alumnus Award and for his hard work and accomplishments. Learn more about the Award here.