Robert James (RJ) Simonds, MD, EIS ’90, has had a career fueled by curiosity, and when that is your driving force, everything is an opportunity.

In 1940, a pair of scientists tried to save the life of a London constable suffering an infection. Though the effort failed, the substance they used—Penicillium notatum—would revolutionize medicine.

Imagine you’re looking for answers to a riddle and are given a stack of 2,000 papers. Somewhere in those pages is a pattern that not only answers today’s riddle, but provides answers to future ones, as well.

Health officials in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) continue to fight an Ebola outbreak that was first spotted in May, posing a significant health threat across five eastern provinces in Africa’s second largest country as well as throughout the region.

When Tropical Storm Helene devastated parts of western North Carolina in September 2024, the CDC Foundation as able to quickly help fill a critical position for the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services through Workforce Services.

In 1951, an epidemiologist named Alexander Langmuir boldly proposed creating a dedicated corps of disease detectives. The program he envisioned would span chapters of American history.

In 1869, the Massachusetts legislature created the Massachusetts State Board of Health, the first of its kind in the United States. Today, the CDC Foundation’s Workforce Acceleration Initiative (WAI) is bolstering state and local public health departments across the country with data and tech professionals.

When Dr. Alexandre Macedo de Oliveira completed his residency at Unicamp in Campinas, Brazil in 1998, HIV/AIDS antiviral treatments were just beginning to transform what had been one of medicine’s most feared diagnoses into a manageable disease. For a young doctor drawn to infectious disease, specifically infectious disease prevention, it was an electrifying moment to enter the field. But Dr. Macedo de Oliveira wanted to reach more people than he could through clinical practice. Clinical practice provided him with the opportunity to serve one patient at a time. He wanted to do more.