Melissa Hawkins is the Director of Undergraduate Programs in the Department of Health Studies at American University. Dr. Hawkins is an epidemiologist with over a decade of experience in the application of public health methodologies to government and private sector challenges. Currently, her research addresses the integration of Community Health Workers (CHW) in the U.S. health workforce, in both clinical and community-based teams, and examining the effectiveness of CHWs as change agents in improving health equity.
The pandemic has brought many tricky terms and ideas from epidemiology into everyone’s lives. Two particularly complicated concepts are vaccine efficacy and effectiveness. These are not the same thing. And as time goes on and new variants like omicron emerge, they are changing, too. Melissa Hawkins is an epidemiologist and public health researcher at American University. She explains […]
