I was going to be a marine biologist until a study abroad semester in Bangkok, Thailand changed my life. There, I was struck by the health challenges facing our global population. I wanted to help and it became my goal to improve the health conditions of people living in resource-limited areas.I’ve spent the past 25 years pursuing this goal. As Deputy Mission Area Executive for National Health at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, I lead efforts to develop novel capabilities that can rapidly detect and respond to changes in health status to better predict and prevent illness, injury and disease.My work has taken me to the far ends of the earth and challenged my team and me to develop inexpensive, customized disease surveillance systems. When communities can quickly assess disease activity, they can more effectively use their limited resources.When I joined APL in 2001, I spent much of my time engaging with local health departments to understand how prospective surveillance initiatives fit within their workflows so we could effectively integrate tools. One of these tools, ESSENCE (Early Notification of Community-based Epidemics), leverages health data to monitor disease outbreaks and assist in disaster recovery efforts. I then transitioned the lessons learned to help resource-limited countries electronically monitor and track disease. This system, SAGES (the Suite for Automated Global Electronic bioSurveillance), has been used in countries around the world. When COVID-19 reached the U.S., we took what we knew about health surveillance to help stand up the data pipelines behind the renowned Johns Hopkins University Coronavirus Resource Center dashboard. This became a critical resource allowing users to track global COVID-19 cases in real time. These days, I’m focused on the modeling, analysis and visualization of nontraditional data to create health data ecosystems. We work closely with national and international public health communities on developing and implementing systems, interfaces, mobile health applications, and advanced analytics for predicting and modeling emerging infectious diseases. There is still so much to do to promote health security, both at home and abroad, and help public health professionals be better prepared for emerging diseases. We do not have the tools needed to best defend against disease X. I’m an advocate for establishing an interconnected network of comprehensive public health data to ensure health and security.I’m just as inspired now to solve these challenges as I was on my first trip to Bangkok.