June 18th is “Maya Petersen” day in San Francisco, in honor of her work building disease models that guided the region through COVID and saved countless lives. 

With projects spanning from developing HIV prevention strategies in East Africa to shaping new Medicaid models in California, the UC Berkeley epidemiologist is building a future where local public health leaders have the tools and data to ask and answer complex policy decisions in real time. Now that’s a world I want to live in.

Dr. Petersen and I discuss:

• How much better our pandemic response would have been if Public Health had access to integrated and linked data

• Her work to bring sophisticated data tools to the point of decision in East Africa

• How California is building population management infrastructure

San Francisco’s Director of Health, Grant Colfax, taught her an important lesson about showing up and helping:

“I remember… saying, ‘You know what? You really need to find somebody who's an expert in this, I'm not an expert in this.’ And he said, ‘Okay, Maya, but if you're gonna find me someone it needs to be in the next 24 hours, because I need help.’ And it was just a reminder that, you know, you're not always going to be an expert, sometimes you just need to show up, do your best… be clear about your uncertainty and communicate well, and that can be… a big service”