Collaborating to eradicate disease through scholarship and community service

Kristin Andrejko ’19

Epidemiologist, Center for Disease Control

MAJOR: SCIENCE-BUSINESS | GLYNN FAMILY HONORS PROGRAM

When the COVID-19 pandemic shut down the world in 2020, Kristin Andrejko ’19 was already armed with formative experiences and learning opportunities that would inform her eventual research on this deadly disease. A science-business major and Hesburgh-Yusko scholar at Notre Dame, Andrejko worked with the non-profit One Sun Health to coordinate, lead, and evaluate a malaria education campaign in partnership with local community health workers. She then interned at both the World Health Organization in Geneva, Switzerland, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the Division of Parasitic Diseases and Malaria, informing her background on global health crises.

At the height of COVID-19 in 2020, Andrejko put her newly-acquired skills to good use. While pursuing her Ph.D. in epidemiology at the University of California-Berkeley, she volunteered with the San Francisco Department of Public Health to manage its exponentially growing data on patient cases. She meanwhile shifted her academic focus to study how school closures and reopening strategies affected the spread of SARS-CoV-2 in the Bay Area. Additionally, she collaborated with the California Department of Public Health to lead a large case-control study of risk factors for infection throughout the state of California. 

Analyzing the real-world effectiveness of masking and the risks associated with group activities in various settings, Andrejko was responsible for hiring and managing a team of more than 30 student interviewers to collect survey data for this project. Her work over the past several years has appeared in numerous peer-reviewed publications, directly informing policy makers in California. 

Andrejko recently accepted a position as an epidemiologist in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, where she will contribute to research on respiratory diseases.