Sharon Abramowitz is a an Associate Research Professor at Georgetown University’s Department of Microbiology and Immunology at GUMC, and is affiliated with Georgetown’s Center for Global Health Science and Security, African Studies, and Anthropology. She is a medical anthropologist, sociologist, and psychiatric epidemiologist who specializes in community engagement, mental health, gender violence, epidemic preparedness and response, and data sharing in crises; and has been a leading global advocate for strengthening social science and risk communications and community engagement (RCCE) capacity, metrics, and utilization in public health emergencies. She is the author of the UNICEF-lead Inter-Agency Minimum Quality Standards and Indicators for Community Engagement, Searching for Normal in the Wake of the Liberian War, co-editor of the book Medical Humanitarianism: Ethnographies of Practice, and numerous publications on the West African Ebola outbreak published in Nature Human Behavior, Social Science and Medicine, The Lancet, Global Public Health, PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases, and the Journal of Infectious Disease. Trained at Harvard, Johns Hopkins, and Rutgers- The State University of New Jersey, Abramowitz served as PI on a Wellcome Trust research study examining data sharing during public health emergencies, and is the lead investigator on a multi-partner, open access archive called The Ebola 100 Project that has gathered over 150 interviews from Ebola responders. She works closely with the World Health Organization, UNICEF, Gates Foundation, the Wellcome Trust, USAID, and other partners to identify opportunities for standardizing and accelerating interactions between social science, clinical medicine, and epidemiology in epidemics. She is also an expert on humanitarian intervention, mental health, gender violence, health sector transitions, and post-conflict reconstruction in West Africa, and serves on several international working groups, advisory boards, and journal editorial boards. Lastly, Abramowitz leads Communitology, an initiative that connects social science research/country-of-origin experts with asylum seekers in the UK, US, Canada, and Europe.
