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Standing before more nearly 1,300 delegates from 88 countries at the opening of the 4th Global Health Security Conference in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, Saskia Popescu welcomed a global community tasked with discussing some of the most pressing challenges facing global health security today. Since earning her PhD in Biodefense from 911����'s  in 2019, her career has spanned infection control, outbreak response, pandemic preparedness, biosecurity policy, and now global health leadership. 

Today, she serves as CEO of the Global Health Security Network (GHSN), an Australian-based multidisciplinary NGO dedicated to facilitating evidence-informed policy for the detection, prevention, and control of infectious disease threats, regardless of origin. 

Through her leadership at the GHSN, Popescu has helped create a platform for experts across disciplines and around the world to address the evolving challenges facing global health security, most recently by leading the planning and execution of the fourth Global Health Security conference, one of the only global health security-focused conferences. 

Reflecting on the conference, Popescu highlighted the need to build a global architecture, emphasizing the importance of moving forward by addressing existing gaps, rather than focusing on what’s been lost. Additionally, she emphasized the importance of maintaining partnerships and investing in preparedness and response efforts outside of disease outbreaks or public health emergencies. 

“How do we ensure that response and preparedness mechanisms are sustainable and agile in the event of shifts in policy or funding, without negatively impacting existing efforts and foreign relationships? I really want to focus on how we can be more collaborative, not just in emergent times,” she said. 

When asked what conversations or themes from the conference she believes had and will continue to have the greatest impact in the months following the conference, Popescu highlighted the large number of cross-disciplinary conversations, the exposure to a wide variety of topics and expertise, and networking that often do not occur within traditional professional silos. For example, professionals working in biosecurity policy had the opportunity to learn more about the technical aspect of biosurveillance or professionals in the public health sector gained a greater understanding of military-civilian partnerships in the Indo-Pacific. 

“You have high-level delegates [minsters of health, government officials] and then your boots-on-the ground subject-matter experts such as epidemiologists working in outbreak response and laboratory biosafety professionals getting to interact with each other and have those frank conversations of how policy decisions affect the people doing the work,” Popescu said. 

The conference also underscored the dedication and commitment of the more than 1,200 attendees who, despite ongoing public health emergencies including the Hantavirus outbreak and the third-largest Ebola outbreak to date, along with competing funding and operational priorities, took the time to have difficult but important conversations while sharing their research and contributions in the field of global health security. 

Beyond her leadership at the GHSN, Popescu continues to shape the field through research and education. Currently, she maintains an appointment as policy researcher at RAND, where her work focuses on enhancing biosecurity and resilience by aiming to identify and address key vulnerabilities in critical infrastructure and private industry. Most recently, she contributed to “Mapping the Informal Bioeconomy,” a project that assesses the informal bioeconomy, focusing on the biosecurity implications, practices, governance, and oversight of community-based biotechnology laboratories. The project was featured as one of the poster presentations at this year’s global health security conference. 

In addition, Popescu serves as an adjunct professor at the Schar School in the . The program prides itself on equipping its students with the skills and education to bridge the gap between science and policy by providing the knowledge and analytic skills necessary to assess the risks posed by natural and man-made biological threat and develop strategies for reducing risk to national and international security. 

Popescu noted that one of the program’s greatest strengths is not only the connections fostered by the school and its leadership, but also the program’s ability to provide students with a diverse toolkit. Rather than being limited to one facet of biodefense or biosecurity, students are exposed to the many disciplines that make up the field and are encouraged to think across science, policy, and public health.

“I’d be remiss if I didn’t call out the community with the program,” she said. “I always felt supported by faculty and my peers, both in my studies but also navigating the journey that is dissertation writing and career development. The biodefense program is really the first place I felt pushed to lean into being multidisciplinary rather than pressured into a specific field or role. It was very much a divergence from trying to fit into a preconceived biodefense box and more about ‘Let’s break the box and build something that serves the complex spaces we actually exist in.’”

If you’re hoping to take a class with Popescu, you might want to get in line. Both of her classes this fall, Biodefense Strategy and Biosurveillance, are one of the few classes that currently have a waitlist!