Key Speakers

Andrew Pavia M.D. is the George and Esther Gross Presidential Professor and Chief of the Division of Pediatric Infectious Diseases and adjunct Professor of Medicine at the University of Utah. He also serves as Director of Hospital Epidemiology at Primary Children’s Medical Center and Associate Director of the Antimicrobial Stewardship Program. He received his MD from Brown University and was a resident and Chief resident in Medicine at Dartmouth. He served as an EIS officer and Preventive Medicine Resident at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) where he worked on diarrheal disease and HIV.  He did Pediatric and Adult ID fellowship at the University of Utah.

He is the author of over 200 peer-reviewed papers and 45 invited reviews, editorials and textbook chapters. He currently serves as an advisor to CDC and the Utah Department of Health on COVID-19, and is a member of the NIH COVID-19 Treatment Guidelines Panel. He is a member of the National Academy of Science, Engineering and Medicine’s (formerly known as the IOM) Preparedness Forum. Dr. Pavia co-chairs the Influenza Guidelines Writing Committee for the Infectious Disease Society of America (IDSA), and chaired the IDWeek Program Committee for 2018. He previously served on the Board of Scientific Counselors for CDC, was a board member of IDSA and chair of the IDSA Pandemic Influenza task force and the IDSA Public Health Committee. He has served on the National Vaccine Advisory Committee and the National Biodefense Science Board (NBSB) where he chaired the influenza working group during the 2009 H1N1 influenza pandemic.

He was voted “Utahn of the year” by the Salt Lake Tribune for his efforts to advocate for children during the COVID-19 pandemic and was awarded the “Roz McGee Children’s Champion” award by Voices for Utah Children.

Ben Abbott was born in Nashville Tennessee and grew up in Orem Utah. He got interested in science and nature from watching TV and mountain biking in the foothills of Mount Timpanogos. Near the end of his senior year at Orem High, he slipped on a pamphlet for the Quinney Scholarship at Utah State University and applied to the Watershed and Earth Systems Science program. During his B.S., he worked as an undergraduate researcher in northern Alaska, investigating how fish influence nutrient cycles in Arctic lakes. That led to his Ph.D. at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, where he studied permafrost climate feedbacks using interdisciplinary techniques to quantify how Arctic and Boreal ecosystems respond to climate change. After finishing his Ph.D. in 2014, he worked as a Marie Curie postdoctoral fellow at the French National Science Foundation (CNRS). While in western France, he studied the effects of agriculture and urbanization on aquatic and marine ecosystems.

Ben is currently an assistant professor in the Environmental Science & Sustainability program at BYU. He works with a large team of creative and passionate students and postdoctoral researchers to understand and encourage sustainability and reciprocity among all members of the human family and all creation. Specifically, they use methods from ecosystem ecology, evolutionary biology, energy system modeling, and social science to understand and decrease environmental pollution, measure and mitigate the effects of climate change, and protect vulnerable human and nonhuman communities worldwide. He has been married to Rachel Gianni Abbott for twelve years, and they have four children who take after them in their love of animals, TV, and biking. For more information, visit his blog, Approximately Limitless.

Dr. DeMaria is a Medical and Laboratory Consultant at the Massachusetts Department of Public Health where he previously served as Medical Director of the Bureau of Infectious Disease and Laboratory Sciences, and for many years as State Epidemiologist for Massachusetts. He is a graduate of Boston University and Harvard Medical School. He trained in internal medicine at Montefiore Medical Center in The Bronx, New York and in infectious diseases at Boston City Hospital and the Boston University School of Medicine. Dr. DeMaria is a Fellow of the Infectious Diseases Society of America and of the Society for Healthcare Epidemiology of America.  He currently is a member or advisor on multiple committees of the Massachusetts Medical Society, as well as serving on the boards of the Grimes King Foundation and the Boston Medical Library, and as President of the Board of Directors of The Public Health Museum.  He is a past president of the Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists, the Massachusetts Infectious Diseases Society and the Northeast Branch of the American Society for Microbiology.