Meet Dr. Beth Cameron.

She’s been a molecular biologist, a science policy advisor, a national security leader, and one of the people inside the White House thinking about the next pandemic long before the rest of us knew it was coming.

Beth has spent her career building what she describes as the smoke alarms of global health: the teams, systems, relationships, funding, and plans that need to exist before an outbreak becomes a crisis.

Her path started in a cancer research lab, but Beth realized that science could have an entirely different kind of impact when it reached the rooms where decisions were being made. That realization eventually took her from Senator Ted Kennedy’s office to the State Department, the Pentagon, and the White House, and into the response to the 2014 Ebola epidemic and the work of preparing for COVID-19.

This is a conversation about what it takes to act before the emergency, why prevention is so difficult to fund when success looks like nothing is happening, and what COVID taught us about the systems we still need to build.

And for the women wondering whether there’s a place for them somewhere between science, policy, national security, or global health, Beth’s message is simple: you can do it.

What Beth wants you to know:

“You can do it. You absolutely can do it… You will find people who will help you. And there’s a place for you here.”

Rapid fire:

• Most underrated preparedness tool: Personal protective equipment (PPE)
  
  
• Outbreaks happening right now she wishes more people were watching: New World Screwworm and H5N1
  
  
• One thing she wishes everyone understood about prevention: It always pays off.

Going beyond the episode:

• Beth on LinkedIn
• Brown University Pandemic Center
• Global Health Security Agenda
• American Democracy and Health Security Initiative

For all resources and links mentioned in this episode, read the full guide here: https://www.alphapodcast.studio/beth-cameron.

With gratitude to the organizations whose archival materials and recordings helped bring alpha to life:

• New Mexico PBS, Critical Mass: Women in Science (audio)
• NASA Image & Video Library
• American Archive of Public Broadcasting