Barbara Mahon is a pediatrician and infectious disease epidemiologist who focuses on public health surveillance, outbreak detection and response, and vaccines. She has spent most of her career in public health practice at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and currently works at the Gates Foundation as deputy director for surveillance and epidemiology. Trained in the CDC’s Epidemic Intelligence Service, she has worked on respiratory, vaccine-preventable, and enteric infectious diseases and on multiple public health emergencies. Most recently, she led the CDC's emergency response during the emergence of the Omicron variant of COVID-19 and then launched a new permanent CDC division, the Coronavirus and Other Respiratory Viruses Division, leading staff working on laboratory, epidemiology, surveillance, and global issues. She also worked on the emergency response to the 2014–2016 West Africa Ebola epidemic, the 2010 introduction of cholera to Haiti, and many other outbreaks, including botulism, salmonellosis, Legionnaires disease, Guillain-Barre syndrome, respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), meningococcal meningitis, Zika, and others. She served as director of the CDC’s Division of Bacterial Diseases in the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, principal investigator for the Sierra Leone Trial to Introduce a Vaccine against Ebola (STRIVE), associate director for antimicrobial resistance in the foodborne disease division, and deputy chief of the Enteric Diseases Epidemiology Branch. She has also worked in academic pediatrics, academic epidemiology, and briefly in the vaccine industry. She loves teaching and is always happy to talk with students about careers in public health practice.