Saskia Popescu

Saskia Popescu is an infectious disease epidemiologist and global health security expert in Phoenix, Arizona. She is an Assistant Professor of epidemiology at the University of Maryland, and holds academic appointments at the University of Arizona and George Mason University’s Schar School of Policy and Government, where she lectures on biopreparedness and outbreak response. Since the start of the Coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic, Popescu has worked to prepare for and mitigate the spread of the disease within healthcare and the entertainment industry, where she led the global epidemiology and infection prevention response for Netflix. She has been recognized for her communication efforts around the pandemic, as well as her work on the front lines in infection prevention and healthcare biopreparedness. Popescu currently is a Policy Researcher at RAND Corporation and Helena, addressing converging biological risks from biological weapons nonproliferation, biosecurity, emerging infectious diseases and ecological security, biopreparedness in private industry, and global health security vulnerabilities.