Megan Diamond is a Manager on the Covid-19 Response & Recovery team, where she leads the wastewater surveillance portfolio. Over the past year, Megan has drawn on her experience in research and strategic stakeholder engagement to facilitate a collaborative network of wastewater testing experts, support innovative initiatives in local health departments and advocate for the use of wastewater-based epidemiology as a sustainable public health tool. Prior to working at The Rockefeller Foundation, Megan was the Assistant Director of the Harvard Global Health Institute, where she oversaw the organizations programmatic initiatives and managed an international consortium on health systems comparisons. She has conducted research on mental health and reproductive rights in the Middle-East and West Africa, and worked as an analyst on the first multi-country, non-communicable disease cohort in sub-Saharan Africa. She holds a Master’s degree in epidemiology from the Harvard School of Public Health.
Authored Content
Aug 16 2023 Perspective Novel Wastewater Toolkit Flags Covid-19 Surges Using Multiple Data Sources Wastewater monitoring has proven to be an effective tool in tracking Covid-19 trends and anticipating impending outbreaks. However, scientists have grappled with challenges in how to interpret and translate wastewater surveillance data to inform public health responses, restricting policymaker response. To address this need, researchers from Mathematica, funded by The Rockefeller Foundation, developed a promising […]
Jul 06 2022 Grantee Impact Story 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 […]
Feb 16 2022 Grantee Impact Story Tracking SARS-CoV-2 and Its Variants in Wastewater: An Old Technique Is Yielding Powerful New Insights in the Covid-19 Pandemic The newest addition to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) Covid Data Tracker reports on levels of SARS-CoV-2 RNA in wastewater. While researchers, public health departments, and some private companies have been monitoring wastewater since the beginning of the pandemic, this tracker marks an important step in the establishment of the National Wastewater Surveillance System […]
Dec 21 2021 Perspective Optimizing Disease Detection and Containment Through a #WasteBeforeCase Approach When a new public health threat emerges – like the highly infectious Omicron variant of the SARS-CoV-2 virus – detecting the first case before there has been widespread community transmission can be like searching for the proverbial needle in a haystack. Yet wastewater testing is a tool optimized to do just that. People infected with […]