Anne Rimoin

Anne Walsh Rimoin (born c. 1970) is an infectious disease epidemiologist whose research focuses on emerging infectious diseases (EIDs), particularly those that are crossing species from animal to human populations. She is a Professor of Epidemiology at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health and Infectious Disease Division of the Geffen School of Medicine and is the Director of the Center for Global and Immigrant Health. She is an internationally recognized expert on the epidemiology of Ebola, human monkeypox, and disease emergence in Central Africa.

Rimoin's positions on COVID-19 health-related issues have made her an expert contributor to CNN, MSNBC's The 11th Hour with Brian Williams, and Real Time with Bill Maher. In print, Rimoin's work has been featured in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Scientific American, Nature and National Geographic as well as more than 70 research articles and book chapters. She was recently inducted as a Fellow of the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene.

Since 2002, Rimoin has been working in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where she founded the UCLA-DRC Health Research and Training program to train U.S. and Congolese epidemiologists to conduct high-impact infectious disease research in low-resource, logistically-complex settings. Her research there has yielded several important discoveries including the emergence of monkeypox since the cessation of smallpox vaccination, and novel strains of Simian Foamy Virus in humans. Her work led to fundamental understandings of the long-term consequence of Ebolavirus infection in the oldest known cohorts of Ebolavirus.

Rimoin's parents are Maryann Rimoin and David Rimoin, a highly regarded Canadian-American physician noted for his contributions to research in the genetics of dwarfism and inheritable diseases. Rimoin went on to receive her Bachelor of Arts degree in African History at Middlebury College, her Masters in Public Health at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) Fielding School of Public Health, and her PhD at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. She also served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Benin, West Africa which is where she began her career in public health working on the guinea worm eradication initiative with UNICEF and the Carter Center.