Epidemiologist
Pennsylvania Department of Health
Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania
Nkuchia M’ikanatha is the Lead Epidemiologist for Antimicrobial Resistance Response at the Pennsylvania Department of Health. His passion is finding ways to improve infectious disease surveillance, including tracking emerging pathogens, while also strengthening public health response through research and training. M’ikanatha is the Principal Investigator for Pennsylvania-based research in collaboration with the National Antimicrobial Resistance Monitoring System supported by the Food and Drug Administration through NIH. He also collaborates in GenomeTrakr Network research supported by the Food and Drug Administration at Penn State Department of Food Sciences.
M’ikanatha serves as an Associate Editor for Emerging Infectious Diseases, responsible for book and other media reviews. He has co-edited two widely used textbooks published by Wiley-Blackwell in Oxford, United Kingdom: Infectious Disease Surveillance, 2nd edition, 2013, and Concepts and Methods in Infectious Disease Surveillance, 2015. An alumnus of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Epidemic Intelligence Service Program, he received master's and doctorate degrees from the University of Michigan. In addition to the Pennsylvania Department of Health and the CDC, he has served and conducted research in several countries including South Africa, Israel, and Kenya