5 Questions for Roza Tammer on Epidemiology

Roza Tammer is the Infection Control Epidemiologist in the Oregon Health Authority’s Healthcare-Associated Infections (HAI) Program, where her focus is infection prevention and control, outbreak response, and workforce development.

This Spring, She is an adjunct instructor in epidemiology at Lewis & Clark.

She also serves as the norovirus and listeria epidemiologist in Acute and Communicable Disease Prevention (ACDP). She has worked in New Hampshire, Connecticut, and Oregon’s state HAI Programs, and is an alum and advisory board member for the California Epidemiologic Investigation Service (Cal-EIS). She also contributes to national public health work through the Society for Healthcare Epidemiology of America (SHEA), the Certification Board in Infection Control (CBIC), and the Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists (CSTE).

Roza earned her BA in Social Anthropology and Art from Lewis & Clark College in 2006 and her MPH in Epidemiology of Microbial Disease from the Yale School of Public Health in 2012. She received her Certification in Infection Control (CIC) in 2016.

Q: What are you teaching in Spring ’26?

I’m teaching epidemiology, which is the study of how we understand the distribution and determinants for health and disease across populations.

Q: What inspired you to pursue a career in epidemiology?

I’ve always been motivated by public service and interested in health, so I gravitated towards public health after college. I dipped my toes into as many aspects of public health as I could - environmental health, community health, food security, cardiovascular health, policymaking, farmworker advocacy - and I ended up becoming very interested in epidemiology, specifically infectious disease epidemiology, after starting to volunteer in a collectively-run syringe exchange program. It really allowed my interests in health and public service to coalesce with some of my own lived experiences as well as my undergraduate degree in social anthropology.

Q: Can you tell us about an experience/ program/project that was meaningful to you and why?

From 2000 to 2003, my entire job was absorbed into the COVID-19 pandemic response. Although outbreak investigations and working with healthcare facilities has always been an important part of my job, usually we are working with pathogens that are known to us and these incidents are typically limited to a single facility or congregate setting. This was on a completely different scale in terms of magnitude and complexity. For nearly three years, the vast majority of my time was spent in healthcare settings with COVID-19 outbreaks and work directly with their staff to control the spread of illness among their staff and residents. I also developed a lot of guidance for those events and helped train our team of infection preventionists. These were some of the most exhausting and isolating years of my life, but at the same time, this is what epidemiologists like me are trained to do, and I know that the training and resources I was able to provide translated into fewer illnesses and fewer deaths, which is most important goal of this work.

Q: What is the first thing you would advise a student to do if they want to be involved in epidemiology or are considering this field as a profession?

The best thing to do is make sure you are really interested in this subject and in this work, because most of the time you’ll be needing a master’s degree or an advanced degree to work as an epidemiologist. It’s important to make sure you are spending your time and money wisely if you do plan to go to graduate school. Read epidemiology books, do informational interviews with epidemiologists both in practice and academia, do an internship or some volunteer work. Just make sure you find it motivating and exciting!

Q: How has your work changed your perspective/everyday life?

I now know where all the germs live! Sometimes I have to stop myself from telling everyone else about them, too.

Q: Who have been some of your mentors or role models, and how have they influenced your career experience?

At Yale, I had an incredible epidemiology professor, Dr. Robert Dubrow, whose kindness, depth of expertise, and passion for the subject knew no bounds. He wrote his own epidemiology textbook! I think our entire cohort felt the same way that I did, because he was honored with the Distinguished Teaching Award the year I graduated. The director of the Emerging Infections Program in Connecticut, Jim Meek, was a wonderful role model as well and supported me in my desire to work in applied epidemiology after finishing my degree. He also gave me a job when I really needed one. Finally, I had several preceptors and supervisors who placed their trust and faith in me, giving me the room to grow into a “real” epidemiologist and pushing me to succeed during my Cal-EIS fellowship and time at the New Hampshire Department of Health and Human Services, including Katrina Hansen and Dr. Sandra Huang.

Q: What are you excited about in teaching for your first semester at LC?

Although I’ve been lucky enough to have had many opportunities to be a guest lecturer, as well as to train and teach graduate and professional audiences, this will be my first time teaching an undergraduate class. I’m really hoping that I can communicate not only the science of epidemiology to my class, but communicate all of the ways that we apply epidemiology in the real world, which is what makes it so interesting and important. I’m also a graduate of LC myself - class of 2006! - and I’m excited to revisit my old campus in this new role.