Jacqueline Houtman’s doctoral research investigated the immune response to a coronavirus in a mouse model for multiple sclerosis. She participated in the Data Entry and Science Communication teams at The COVID Tracking Project at The Atlantic. As a freelance biomedical science writer and editor, she worked with organizations including the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, FASEB, The Dana Foundation, and The National Hemophilia Foundation. She is an award-winning author of books for young people.
Dr. Houtman received a BA in Biological Sciences and an MS in Animal Science from the University of Delaware, as well as a PhD in Medical Microbiology and Immunology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Authored Content
Nov 10 2022 Blog Post The Increasing Burden of Dengue Fever in a Changing Climate When most people think of climate change, they envision melting icebergs and a rising sea level. While climate change is indeed warming the globe and causing the seas to rise, that is not the only detrimental effect. Disruption of weather patterns can include stronger and more frequent storms, droughts, wildfires, extreme flooding and heat waves. […]
Aug 25 2022 Blog Post There’s Something in the Air: Monitoring Indoor Air for SARS-CoV-2 Public health decisions about Covid-19 depend on knowledge about the level of SARS-CoV-2 circulating in a community. Clinical data obtained from individuals through nasal swab samples is crucial, but with a decrease in case reporting, in part due to increased home testing, the data needed to estimate disease prevalence is becoming less reliable. As an […]
Jul 06 2022 Field Note Tackling the Complexities of Covid-19 Wastewater Surveillance For more than two years, data derived from polymerase chain reaction (PCR) and rapid antigen tests on nasal swabs from individuals has been the primary source of data on Covid-19 in communities. As clinical testing data is becoming less reliably available, wastewater surveillance has emerged as a valuable epidemiological tool. It can detect the presence […]
Jun 06 2022 Blueprint The Challenge of Measuring Vaccine Effectiveness In mid-November 2020, as Covid-19 cases were rising and two thousand people were dying every day in the U.S., Americans needed hope. They got it. Hope arrived in a syringe. Effective vaccines were developed in record time, with the promise of ending the current pandemic. The scientific discoveries behind that quick vaccine development are also […]
Apr 05 2022 Blog Post A User’s Guide to U.S. Vaccine Breakthrough Rates With the United States over a year into its vaccination campaign, all eyes right now are on Covid-19 rates broken out by vaccination status—measures of the number of Covid-19 cases, hospitalizations, and deaths per 100,000 vaccinated or unvaccinated individuals. Shared by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) as well as many state, […]