Global Health Tuesday: Women in Science

Dr. Kristin Long is an Associate Professor of Surgery at the University of Wisconsin (UW), with clinical practice in Endocrine Surgery.  She completed her medical degree at Texas Tech University, her general surgery training at the University of Kentucky, and her subspecialty fellowship training at MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas.  Dr. Long is passionate about global surgery, having worked on the ground in Kenya, Ethiopia, and Palestine improving access to surgical care and education over the last decade.  After joining the faculty at UW, she completed her Masters in Public Health degree at the UW school of medicine and public health.  She is also a fellow of the College of Surgeons of Eastern Central and Southern Africa, serves as a The College of Surgeons of East, Central and Southern Africa (COSECSA) Board Examiner, and chairs the Global Affairs Committee of the American Association of Endocrine Surgeons.

Caroline Zellmer is a PhD scientist and leads early therapeutic development and strategy at Foresite Labs. Most recently Zellmer led three large industrial-academic therapeutic development collaborations at the University of Cambridge, including one with GSK where she also was a Visiting Scientist. Prior to Cambridge Caroline developed microbial therapeutics for malnutrition and diarrheal diseases and led the first clinical trial of a microbial therapeutic in a low-to-middle-income country. During this time, Zellmer also held joint positions as a Research Affiliate and Visiting Lecturer at MIT. Zellmer started her career investigating emerging infectious diseases at the US NIH. 

Zellmer received her bachelor’s degree with honors in research at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where she studied Microbiology, History of Science, and Global Health. She later completed graduate training at the Institut Pasteur, Paris and received her PhD from the University of Cambridge, where she developed novel therapeutics for drug resistant pathogens. In a volunteer capacity, Zellmer serves on advisory boards for the University of Wisconsin-Madison Global Health Institute and the Microbiology Society. Her work has been published in the New England Journal of Medicine and cited in the IDSA clinical treatment guidelines for C. difficile infection.

Zuzana Burivalova is an Assistant Professor and the Principal Investigator of the Sound Forest Lab. She is a tropical forest ecologist and conservation scientist, based at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she is affiliated with the department of Forest & Wildlife Ecology, The Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies, and the Center for Sustainability and the Global Environment (SAGE). Previously, Burivalova was a NatureNet post-doctoral research fellow at Princeton University and The Nature Conservancy.

She looks for ways to protect biodiversity in tropical forests, both forests that are used by people, for example for logging, and forests set aside for conservation, from national parks to small community protected areas. She tries to answer tricky questions in tropical forest ecology using new technologies, such as through recording soundscapes, where traditional field methods aren’t enough. Burivalova also collaborates with the environmental news platform Mongabay on understanding which conservation strategies succeed and fail in tropical forests. She feels privileged to have worked in the tropical forests of Madagascar, Papua New Guinea, Borneo, and Gabon.

She is the 2021 winner of the nature award for driving global impact. In 2023, she received the Bassam Z. Shakhashiri Public Science Engagement Award. Burivalova is honored to receive the 2023 WINGS Women of Discovery Award.