If Céline Gounder, M.D., Sc.M., F.I.D.S.A., looks familiar, she should. For nearly 15 years, she’s been a regular fixture on national television news, helping to bridge the information gap between science, health policy and public impact. We recently caught up with Gounder to learn more about the unique trajectory of her career since graduating from fellowship (2007 - 2010) in the Johns Hopkins Division of Infectious Diseases.

After fellowship, Gounder went to work as an assistant commissioner in the New York City Department of Health. Being a civil servant in public health during a recession was eye-opening.

“As a result of recessions, you get cuts in discretionary funding. I had to fire 20% of my staff of 250 people [in the first year],” she recalls. “But what I realized was that if people don’t understand what public health is, they won’t want to put taxpayer money into it … they don’t view it as something valuable.”

She set out to change that.

For the next several years, Gounder nurtured a burgeoning media career while providing clinical care in a variety of roles. In 2015, she volunteered as an aid worker in Guinea during the West African Ebola outbreak. From 2017 to 2018, she was a physician in the Indian Health Service in the southwest and far northeast of the United States. She has cared for patients with tuberculosis, HIV, opioid use disorder and emerging infectious diseases. She is currently a part-time internal medicine and infectious diseases clinician at New York’s Bellevue Hospital.

Her ability to see the story behind the science and tell it in a way that resonates with the public has made her one of the most sought-after voices in medical reporting across the full spectrum of media platforms. She covered the 2014–2016 Ebola epidemic for CNN and other news outlets, then continued to report on global infectious disease outbreaks as they happened: Zika, MERS, chikungunya, COVID-19. Gounder has written for The New York Times, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, The Washington Post and more. She launched her first award-winning podcast, American Diagnosis, in 2017; her second, Epidemic, debuted in 2021. She publishes a popular daily newsletter on Substack and has tens of thousands of followers on social media. Since 2022, Gounder has been a CBS News medical correspondent and the editor-at-large for public health at KFF (formerly Kaiser Family Foundation) Health News.

As a regular contributor on CBS Mornings, the network’s weekday morning show, a typical day for Gounder starts before dawn.

“I have a car pick me up at 6 a.m. to take me to the studio. I review my notes while they’re doing my hair and makeup,” Gounder says. She gets about two and a half minutes of airtime to get her message across. “You have to speak simply and clearly and in a way that people will understand. And it can be very challenging in this moment when public health issues, especially including vaccines, are hyperpolarizing.”

After she’s finished in the broadcast center, Gounder returns home to work on her next story or TV segment. A prolific writer, she spends her days — and well into most nights — interviewing subjects, compiling notes, writing pitches or fine-tuning long-form stories for KFF Health News on a range of topics, like upheaval at the CDC, concerns about transparency and oversight in the organ donation and procurement system, or the troubling uptick in cases of silicosis, a progressive lung disease caused by long-term exposure to silica dust. She’s a respected collaborator, and consults with colleagues on a variety of projects.

“I think it’s important to not be pigeonholed just in infectious diseases,” she says. “People think public health is only infectious disease, and yes, it is an important part of it, and I’m obviously very passionate about it, but I think, in this moment, we need to help people understand more broadly what [public health] is.”

Gounder says demystifying how scientific discovery and health policy work in real life are critical as the media landscape evolves. She admits the decline of legacy media and the rise of passive news consumption via social media make it hard for those with a desire to follow in her footsteps, but that pulling back the lab curtain to help people understand why the work matters outside of academia is an effective way to combat public mistrust.

“Can everybody do what I do? No. But I think there is a real responsibility, at the very least in your community, to be sharing information and to make yourself available. To explain what you do. And that could be in public schools, it could be at your place of worship. … There are other avenues to be engaging with people.”

Gounder believes having those kinds of conversations can sometimes do more to shift perspective on the importance of research and public investment in it than speaking broadly to a national audience. She spent a lot of time during the COVID-19 pandemic working with churches, schools and community health boards, interacting with people on a much smaller scale.

“You learn a lot from people about what they’re actually experiencing,” Gounder notes.

She shared a story about a friend who asked Gounder to speak with a family member who was hesitant about getting a COVID vaccine in the early days of the rollout. Her approach was to ask questions, listen and try to understand why the woman didn’t want to get vaccinated. They spoke for about 45 minutes; not long after, Gounder’s friend reached out again to say his family member had changed her mind and signed up to get a COVID vaccine.

“I think a lot of people think the only way to make a difference is to be on TV or to have an op-ed in The New York Times. Very often, that’s not at all how you can shift people’s perspective on these things,” Gounder explains. “Sometimes you can have a huge win with a smaller number of people, and that counts, too.”

Gounder credits mentor Dick Chaisson with helping her develop some of the skills that have made it possible to forge her own path as a medical journalist. They first met while she was pursuing a master of science in epidemiology at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health from 1998 to 2000. Returning to Johns Hopkins after medical school and residency, and working closely again with Chaisson as a research associate in the final year of her fellowship, Gounder says she was given an opportunity to blend scientific discovery with real-world implementation.

“That was a really transformative, important experience. I think the freedom I had to pursue different interests was really important. I definitely got those traditional skills, but also the more — I would call it entrepreneurial skills, which is a lot of what I’ve had to do [in journalism]. How do you create your own thing?” she says.

The bonds she formed with fellow trainees have lasted, too.

“Maunank Shah and Chris Hoffmann and Larry Chang, Emily Sydnor and Adam Spivak. We had some really amazing people, and I’m still in touch with a lot of those folks, which is great,” Gounder says.