Dr. Savoia is a Principal Scientist in Biostatistics and a medical doctor by training. During the past fifteen years, Dr. Savoia has been leading research and training activities at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health focused on public health emergency preparedness. She is the co-director of the Emergency Preparedness Research, Evaluation & Practice (EPREP) Program for which she has been P.I. of over twenty research and training projects. She is also the founder of the Community Safety & Security branch where she directs research projects focused on youth violence, violent extremism, and the evaluation of reintegration programs for terrorist offenders. She has devoted her professional life to the use of evaluation methods to measure systems’ capabilities in response to large-scale emergencies, and in evaluating the impact of programs designed to prevent violent extremism and online hate. Her work has focused on the advancement of evaluation science to assess the elements of a public health system that lead to a successful response and the population-based factors and workforce training and characteristics that may improve the resiliency of public health systems and communities. Dr. Savoia’s full CV.

Dr. Testa is a Senior Lecturer in Biostatistics. As an experienced public health practitioner, health outcomes researcher, evaluator, biostatistician, and the current Co-Director of the Harvard T.H. Chan EPREP program, for the past 30 years Dr. Testa has worked closely with federal, state, county, regional and local public health, community and government authorities. She previously served as the Head of the Evaluation Core for the CDC-sponsored, Harvard Academic Center for Public Health Preparedness, and as a Co-Investigator within the Harvard Preparedness and Emergency Response Research Center (PERRC) leading several national committees in bioterrorism, disaster planning and operations. She also was the Principal Investigator and Director of the Harvard Chan Preparedness and Emergency Response Learning Center (PERLC) between 2010 and 2016 working on the development of competency-based instructional development and evaluation and leading several national committees focused on public health and emergency preparedness curriculum development, trainings and tools.  She has been the Director of the Harvard MPH Program in Quantitative Methods for nearly 30 years, mentoring over 1,200 student research projects.  She is currently President of the Massachusetts Association of Health Boards working with 351 BOHs and 329 health departments.

Dr. Su is a Research Associate with backgrounds in mathematics, biostatistics, patient-centered outcomes research, and information technology. He received his ScB in mathematics from Brown University and his ScD in Biostatistics from Harvard University. Dr. Su is serving as the senior statistician and information technologist for the EPREP program. He has over 20 years of experience as a biostatistician specialized in outcome research and clinical trials. For the EPREP program, he leads the development of study designs and conducts statistical analysis of all evaluation-centered activities. 

Dr. Piltch-Loeb is a Research Scientist in the Department of Biostatistics and works as project director with the EPREP program. She received her masters degree from the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University and her undergraduate degree from Georgetown University. She also holds a doctorate degree in Public Health, and she is also a junior research scientist at NYU’s College of Global Public Health’s Program on Population Impact, Recovery and Resilience. Dr. Piltch-Loeb’s current research interests are in interdisciplinary public health systems improvement.

Jessica Stern is a senior fellow in the Community Safety Evaluation Lab at and a research professor at the Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University. She is a member of the National Academy of Sciences Committee on preventing nuclear terrorism. Dr. Stern is a recipient of the 2024 Harry Frank Guggenheim Distinguished Scholar award. She has taught courses on counterterrorism for over 20 years – at Boston University, Harvard, and CIA University. Her research has been funded by DHS, DOJ, NSF, NATO, MacArthur Foundation, among others. She is the author of five books on targeted violence. Stern served on President Clinton’s National Security Council Staff and as a postdoctoral fellow in intelligence at Livermore National Lab. She was included among seven “thinkers” in Time Magazine’s 2001 series profiling 100 innovators and was selected as a Guggenheim Fellow in 2009, a World Economic Forum Fellow from 2002-2004, an International Affairs Fellow in 1994, and elected to Sigma Xi, an engineering honors society, in 1986. She has a bachelor’s degree from Barnard College in chemistry, a master’s degree from MIT in technology policy (chemical engineering), and a doctorate from Harvard University in public policy. She is a 2016 graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Psychoanalysis. Please see her personal website here for her full CV.

Mr. Montrond is a Senior Preparedness Fellow and Diplomat in the DPTLD at the Harvard Chan School. He obtained a master’s degree in international relations (GMAP) from the Fletcher School at TUFTS University.  From 2016 to 2021, he was a Deputy Member of Parliament for the Republic of Cape Verde representing the diaspora community in the Americas. Mr. Montrond works as a liaison between the research team, government officials and community-based organizations.

Evelyn Masterson has worked as a research assistant with the EPREP Program since June 2021, focusing on vaccine hesitancy, human trafficking, occupational safety, communication, and training. She joined EPREP in May 2021 as a Harvard Chan School Master of Public Health practicum student, with the health management field of study and an interdisciplinary concentration in infectious disease epidemiology. She has long been interested in emergency preparedness, and has been volunteering with the American Red Cross and the Boston Medical Reserve Corps since 2017 and 2019 respectively.