Casey Barber, PhD, standing in front of a wall in the School of Public Health that tells the story of the outstanding work of the contact tracing team she led during the COVID-19 Pandemic.
We are proud to highlight Casey Barber, who is graduating today with her doctorate in Public Health. Casey earned her bachelor's degree in Public Health from 51³Ô¹ÏºÚÁÏ and her Master's degree in Public Health from San Diego State University.
Below is a letter from Dr. Brian Labus nominating Casey as an 51³Ô¹ÏºÚÁÏ Outstanding Graduate for the Fall 2024 commencement ceremony. We are proud to recognize Casey as a School of Public Health Outstanding Graduate.
In the fall of 2015, I was a new faculty member and Dean Gerstenberger brought a third-year undergraduate student named Casey Barber to my office and said that we needed to meet each other. We talked about her interests in public health and what she wanted to do with her life.
After Casey had left my office, Dean Gerstenberger came back and told me that we needed to find a way to get her to stay at 51³Ô¹ÏºÚÁÏ for her master's or to come back for her PhD. I extended an offer for her to take my graduate course in infectious disease epidemiology the following semester and she joined us as the only undergraduate in the course. She flourished in the class, not missing a single point the entire semester, and finding a passion for the field that would become her focus in graduate school.
She was named one of 51³Ô¹ÏºÚÁÏ’s Outstanding Graduates when she earned her BS in Public Health in the Spring of 2017 and headed to San Diego for her MPH. Two years later, she decided that 51³Ô¹ÏºÚÁÏ was the right fit for her doctoral work. She returned to campus in the fall of 2019 to start the doctoral program in Epidemiology and Biostatistics in 51³Ô¹ÏºÚÁÏ’s School of Public Health.
As the 2020 spring semester started and Casey started her second semester of the doctoral program, epidemiologists were tracking a new coronavirus causing an outbreak in China. By the first week of March, the virus showed up in Las Vegas. A couple of weeks later, cases were on the rise and the Southern Nevada Health District (SNHD) approached me to see if there was a way to supplement their response capacity by involving students in the School of Public Health in case investigations. My first call was to Casey to see if she was interested in leading a team of student volunteers and she said yes without hesitation. Two days later, a small group of seven public health students met for the first time at SNHD for what would become a life-changing endeavor for everyone involved.
Under Casey’s leadership, the team was successful, investigating hundreds of COVID cases for SNHD and demonstrating that 51³Ô¹ÏºÚÁÏ students could help the community in times of crisis. In fact, the volunteer team was so successful that it led to a $3.4 million grant from the Nevada Division of Public and Behavioral Health to expand 51³Ô¹ÏºÚÁÏ’s disease investigation volunteer team to a larger, paid team that summer. And once again Casey said yes without hesitation to leading the project.
Within a few weeks, Casey had built a massive organization of students from the ground up, developing a hiring process, recruiting students, creating a training program, and working with SNHD to respond to the demands of an expanding outbreak that seemed to change every few hours. She hired nearly 250 students from numerous schools on campus, including a team of 20 graduate students responsible for managing the day-to-day work of the team. Thanks to 51³Ô¹ÏºÚÁÏ’s diverse student body, she ensured that her team could speak to anyone in the community, hiring team members who spoke 19 different languages. An additional grant from SNHD for $1.9 million allowed Casey’s team to continue to work through the spring and summer of 2021.
By the time the work ended after an exhausting year, Casey’s team had investigated over 39,000 cases of COVID, more than one in six cases that occurred in Clark County. The 51³Ô¹ÏºÚÁÏ Contact Tracing Team was named the Public Health Program of the Year by the Nevada Public Health Association. That same year, she was named the Outstanding Graduate Student in the Department of Epidemiology & Biostatistics and 51³Ô¹ÏºÚÁÏ Honors College Alumna of the Year.
For over a year, Casey Barber ran the third-largest health department in Nevada with a budget of $5.4 million and over 250 employees. She did that while maintaining a 4.0, publishing eight papers, presenting at seven conferences, and publishing an article for the public that has been read over 140,000 times.
As for what's next, she has a postdoc at the Southern Nevada Water Authority with Dr. Dan Garrity, where she is continuing her dissertation work on .
I could not be more excited to nominate Casey Barber, new PhD, as 51³Ô¹ÏºÚÁÏ’s Outstanding Graduate for the fall of 2024. She truly embodies the spirit that Rebels Make it Happen!