Dr Inger K. Damon

Professor Damon retired from the CDC in September 2022, where her career spanned 23 years of work on deadly diseases and associated preparedness and response efforts. Currently, she continues to hold an Adjunct Faculty position with Emory University School of Medicine. She is one of the world’s experts on orthopoxviruses including smallpox. For over fifteen years, Professor Damon directed CDC’s smallpox research programme, conducting research to help develop new smallpox diagnostic tests, assess the effectiveness of new vaccines, and create better drugs for treatment. Her expertise leading this global poxvirus activity included programmes to look for sources of poxviruses in wildlife, leading CDC’s 2003 response to an outbreak of mpox in the United States linked to imported exotic pets, and reestablishment of collaborative work on mpox in the Congo Basin.

From 2014-2022, Professor Damon served as the director for the Division of High Consequence Pathogens and Pathology, overseeing the agency’s expertise on deadly pathogens such as Ebola, other viral hemorrhagic fever viruses, smallpox, rabies, and anthrax. The Division has responsibility for a broad range of bacterial and viral pathogens, ME/CFS, as well as prion diseases and cross-cutting pathology roles. She served as the lncident Manager for CDC’s response to the Ebola epidemic in West Africa to help direct the agency’s national and global fight against Ebola.

Professor Damon has worked with multiple international and national organizations. She served as a member of the Scientific Advisory Board for Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations from 2017–2023 and has been a member of the WHO Advisory Committee on Variola Virus Research from 2018 to the present. She participated as a work group member with the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) to review information to contribute to ACIP decision making on orthopoxvirus and mpox vaccination recommendations in the United States and participated as a member of U.S. interagency smallpox preparedness efforts in the Public Health Emergency Countermeasure Enterprise (PHEMCE). In October 2023, Professor Damon joined the WHO R&D Pathogen Prioritization workgroup considering Poxvirus family pathogens. She has been a member of the WHO Scientific Advisory Group on the Origins of novel Pathogens (SAGO) since its inception. She is a co-inventor on a patent for a poxvirus diagnostic assay and has published, with multiple co-authors and collaborators, over 200 peer reviewed manuscripts, agency documents, or textbook chapters related to research to understand responding to orthopoxviruses and emerging pathogens.

Professor Damon served as Rapporteur of the IHR Review Committee regarding Standing Recommendations for mpox and was a member of the IHR Review Committee regarding Standing Recommendations for COVID-19.

Professor Damon completed a combined MD PhD program at the University of Connecticut Health Center in 1992, and a B.A., magna cum laude in Chemistry, from Amherst College in 1984. She trained in Internal Medicine at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania (1992-1995) and completed a fellowship in Infectious Diseases at NIAID in 1999 where she worked in the laboratory of Dr Bernard Moss.