Dr. Ashish Jha started 2020 thousands of miles from home, taking a sabbatical in Europe from his academic post at Harvard. Then the coronavirus pandemic arrived in the U.S.
For Dr. Angela Rasmussen, a Seattle-based virologist affiliated with Georgetown University in Washington, her newfound notoriety hit home in July when she got into a Twitter debate with billionaire Elon Musk.
Laurel Bristow, an infectious disease researcher at Emory University in Atlanta, suggests it's an indictment of academia that misinformation and conspiracy theories thrive and that parts of American society remain deeply skeptical of true scientific work.
"Experts in these fields have ignored the importance of communication and bringing information to people in a way that is understandable and relatable for so long," Bristow said. "You have to put a face to something for people to be able to trust it."
Dr. Akiko Iwasaki, an immunobiology professor at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, said she has sought interviews with conservative media outlets as a way to combat fear and misinformation, especially with the nationwide vaccine rollout underway.
"There's such a divide in society. I'd really like to reach the other side and make a difference," said Iwasaki, who was already a notable advocate of women in science and tech fields before the pandemic but has seen her Twitter following swell to more than 90,000 this year.
These four COVID-19 experts somewhat reluctantly stepped into the spotlight this past year and became magnets for controversy. Plus, view a "pandemic atlas" charting the virus's rise and fall around the world.
