Erin M. Sorrell

Erin M. Sorrell, PhD, is a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security and an associate professor at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Sorrell’s work focuses on identifying elements required to support health systems strengthening and laboratory capacity building for disease detection, reporting, risk assessment, and response. She is also interested in operational and implementation research questions related to sustainable health systems strengthening, with an emphasis on the prevention, management, and control of infectious diseases in humanitarian situations, and particularly countries and regions affected by conflict.

In 2020, Sorrell became the director of the Elizabeth R. Griffin Program (ERGP). Through collaborative research, training, and education, ERGP promotes evidence-based biosafety and biosecurity practices to protect the health and safety of researchers as well as the workers on the front lines of disease detection around the world. Sorrell received a BS in animal science from Cornell University and an MSc and PhD from the University of Maryland, studying the molecular mechanisms of interspecies transmission of avian influenza A viruses. Erin was a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Maryland and Erasmus Medical Center. Sorrell was an AAAS fellow, a Emerging Leaders in Biosecurity Fellow and a term member at the Council on Foreign Relations.