Assistant Professor of Medicine
Division of Infectious Diseases
Originally from Wisconsin, Dr. Emily Ciccone attended Grinnell College in Iowa for her undergraduate studies in Biology. There she began her engagement in global health, spending a semester abroad in Tanzania performing field research. She then attended Johns Hopkins for her Master’s degree in Global Disease Epidemiology, completing her thesis project in Rakai, Uganda conducting a proof-of-concept study of an RT-PCR technique for determining a surrogate for the total lymphocyte count from dried blood spots among HIV-infected individuals. She returned home for medical school at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health.
Dr. Ciccone first came to UNC for combined Internal Medicine and Pediatrics residency, frequently traveling to Malawi to participate in clinical, research, and education-focused work. This included completing an audit of pediatric deaths to identify gaps in care that could be targeted by quality improvement interventions, developing and implementing a Pediatric Acute Care Database, formalizing the curriculum for rotating residents in Pediatrics in Malawi, and designing and implementing a pre-departure global health simulation curriculum. She next pursued clinical fellowship training at UNC in Infectious Diseases and, as an OGHE Global Scholar, continued to oversee and support the Pediatric Acute Care Database while simultaneously developing research centered on antimicrobial stewardship in resource-constrained settings.
Dr. Ciccone is currently an Assistant Professor within the Division of Infectious Diseases in the Department of Medicine. She has received the Thrasher Research Foundation Early Career Award and the Burroughs Wellcome Fund/ASTMH Postdoctoral Fellowship in Tropical Infectious Diseases, with current projects focusing on exploring the use of a rapid point-of-care diagnostics to improve evaluation and management of febrile children in rural western Uganda. She is also part of a team that was awarded a Gates Foundation Grand Challenges Explorations grant to establish metagenomic next-generation sequencing at a research laboratory in Malawi.
