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 to Wisconsin for medical school, during which time she traveled to Ecuador to learn medical Spanish.
She then completed combined Med-Peds residency at UNC, 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 OIA Global Scholar, has 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 a Clinical Instructor/Fellow within the Division of Infectious Diseases in the Department of Medicine. She is a Thrasher Research Foundation Early Career Award recipient with current projects focused on exploring the use of a rapid point-of-care tests to differentiate viral from bacterial respiratory infections among malaria-negative children in rural western Uganda. She is also part of a team that was recently awarded a Gates Foundation Grand Challenges Explorations grant to establish metagenomic next generation sequencing at a research laboratory in Malawi to improve pathogen detection and antimicrobial stewardship.
