University of California, Davis

When Brian Bird and his team from the Centers for Disease Control arrived at the hospital in Kenema, Sierra Leone, during the 2014 Ebola outbreak, half the hospital’s staff were dead or missing from work. “Ebola outbreaks have the singular ability to reveal how fragile our systems are,” Bird said. “We depend on people caring for each other, and Ebola preys on this because it puts caregivers at extreme risk.” Bird, a graduate of the University of California, Davis, School of Veterinary Medicine, helped coordinate operations of the U.S. government’s diagnostic labs in the region during the outbreak, which sickened at least 28,000