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Inger Damon (she/her/hers)

M.D., Ph.D, FIDSA

In April 2014, Dr. Damon assumed leadership of the Division of High Consequence Pathogens and Pathology within the U.S. Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Diseases. From July 2014 through March 2015, she served as the Incident Commander for the CDC’s West African Ebola Response. Dr. Damon previously spent 15 years working in various scientific or leadership roles in the Poxvirus and Rabies Branch at CDC. Under her leadership, the Poxvirus Program at CDC has developed programs of study in human orthopoxvirus disease pathogenesis, animal models of orthopoxvirus disease, laboratory diagnostics development, therapeutics and vaccine evaluation, poxvirus surveillance activities, ecological investigations of poxviruses, and studies of the (zoonotic) transmission dynamics of orthopoxviruses. She has worked with the U.S. government on smallpox preparedness activities, and has been involved in multiple outbreak responses, including the response to the importation of monkeypox to the U.S. in 2003. She was the director of one the two WHO Collaborating Centers for Smallpox and other Poxvirus Infections from 2005 until 2022, is certified to work, and trained others to work in the high containment (BSL-3 and BSL-4) laboratories. Dr Damon retired from CDC in September 2022, and has continued to provide consultation regarding the 2022 mpox outbreak. She is an Adjunct Clinical faculty member at Emory University. She continues to serve as an advisor to the World Health Organization on variola virus research, and has been an advisor to the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) for five years.

Dr Damon completed a B.A. in chemistry at Amherst College, an MD-PhD at the University of Connecticut Health Center, internal medicine residency at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania and an Infectious Diseases fellowship at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. At NIAID, she worked in the laboratory of Bernard Moss MD PhD. Dr Damon has written many medical textbook chapters on poxvirus diseases, and has contributed to over almost 200 peer reviewed publications on emerging infectious diseases with an emphasis on orthopoxvirus infections.

I do not have any relevant financial / non-financial relationships with any proprietary interests.

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