When COVID-19 started to make its way into the US in early 2020, Jeff Bailey, MD, PhD, associate professor of pathology and laboratory medicine, thought back to his time in Liberia. In 2013 and 2014, he responded to the West African Ebola outbreak, work for which he was given the Britney Gengel International Humanitarian Award by the Red Cross.
“People presumed things were getting done by others because they seemed like the obvious things to do,” he says. “We later found out that everyone was thinking about the obvious things, but no one was doing them.”
Bailey, who is also a practicing physician in transfusion medicine and coagulation at The Miriam and Rhode Island hospitals, didn’t want the same thing to happen when a different pandemic reached their doorstep. So since March, he has headed the COVID research task force for Brown, coordinating the University-wide effort to better understand, treat, and manage COVID-19.