Jordan Schermerhorn, M.Sc.

Senior Research Associate

Jordan Schermerhorn is a Senior Research Associate at the Center for Global Health Science and Security at Georgetown University. Her research interests center on infectious disease detection and response in conflict settings, fragile states, and extremely low-resource areas, with a geographic emphasis on the Sahel and Horn of Africa. 

Ms. Schermerhorn has held long-term residential field postings in Northeast Nigeria, researching health and conflict indicators in areas inaccessible to humanitarian actors under Boko Haram control; Djibouti, where she managed a biological research laboratory in support of AFRICOM; and Chad, managing national disease surveillance data and operational research with the Guinea Worm Eradication Program. She has served as a field consultant regarding technology introduction in austere environments, most recently genomic surveillance and next-generation sequencing. Ms. Schermerhorn is proficient in French and Arabic, with programmatic experience in field epidemiology, laboratory capacity building, and civil-military coordination. Her work has especially focused on the role community engagement and political outreach to nomadic populations and non-state actors play in disease surveillance initiatives. Previously, she supported the White House Office of National AIDS Policy on the 2015 Update to the National HIV/AIDS Strategy.

Ms. Schermerhorn is a 2020 Defense Council member with the Truman National Security Project and was a 2018 Fellow with the Emerging Leaders in Biosecurity Initiative at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. She holds an M.Sc. in Global Health from Duke University and a B.S. in Bioengineering from Rice University.