Disease-prevention pioneer Smolinski is back where he started

He’s been called a pandemic hunter, a disease detective and a threat detective.

That last one stuck. Mark Smolinski, MD, MPH, even used “threat detective” as his official title on business cards. 

Why does it resonate above the others?

“The job is about looking for more than just disease because if it’s already the disease, we’ve lost,” said Smolinski, executive director of the Ending Pandemics Academy at the University of Arizona Mel and Enid Zuckerman College of Public Health Global Health Institute. 

Smolinski is all about prevention. As the Jeff Skoll Endowed Chair in Ending Pandemics and a professor of practice at the Zuckerman College of Public Health, he has spent 30-plus years fighting outbreaks across continents and leading global efforts for early detection and rapid response to emerging disease threats.

A visionary in the field of public health, Smolinski launched Ending Pandemics, whose mission is stated right in its name. The groundbreaking disease-prevention nonprofit got its start at the Skoll Global Threats Fund, a philanthropic organization created by Jeff Skoll, the first president of eBay.

Now based at the U of A — thanks to a $5 million gift from the Skoll Foundation — Ending Pandemics is poised to move to the next level.

Smolinski and Nomita Divi, MSPH, the academy’s director of programs, are working to transform the organization. What was a disease surveillance development unit that brought together government, the private sector and regular citizens to develop digital tools to predict, detect and prevent outbreaks is being remade into an educational powerhouse to teach cutting-edge disease detection. 

“We’re training not just students and staff but health professionals and corporate leaders,” said Smolinski. “We learned during the COVID-19 pandemic that everyone was calling us and wanted to know what to do. We’re excited to really help Arizona be a model program for engaging all these different sectors to really think about how we can be better prepared for the next pandemic.” 

Hitting the ground running 

In a field where every second counts, it should come as no surprise that the Ending Pandemics Academy, which officially began in November, already has its first two years mapped out. Most of Smolinski’s office might still be in boxes, but he knows what’s happening in 2027. That’s when the academy plans to host the first international conference on digital disease detection since 2015, an event that attracted 60 countries.

Before that, the goal for 2026 is to bring together human and animal health care professionals with software developers to develop low-cost, open-source technology tools in a process called EpiHack. The idea is to work in the style of a hackathon, cranking out solutions collaboratively on a very short deadline that will improve disease prevention and early detection.

“Ending Pandemics has done this in countries across the globe, but we want to do it here in Arizona and then expand this process to the rest of the United States,” Smolinski said. 

It’s this kind of innovation that makes the college and the academy perfect partners at the forefront of health emergency preparedness, said Iman Hakim, MD, PhD, MPH, dean of the Zuckerman College of Public Health. 

“We’re so fortunate to have Mark in the college to continue his groundbreaking work through the Ending Pandemics Academy,” Hakim said. “He brings extensive experience working collaboratively with communities globally, connecting them with applied technologies. His mission to train people to monitor and report the spread of disease in their own neighborhoods is critical to stopping the next pandemic, saving lives and securing the health of communities.” 

Unraveling the mystery

Smolinski reads mysteries. Lots of them. Only a good suspense thriller can lure him into a movie theater.

“It’s really just that unknown and trying to figure it out,” said Smolinski, who was first enticed to campus by a preventive medicine residency ad in the Journal of the American Medical Association after completing his internal medicine residency. “That’s how my mind works. That’s the kind of stuff that gets me excited.”

Smolinski, who, along with Hakim, was part of the first U of A Master of Public Health graduating class in 1994, found himself thrust into the middle of a real-life medical mystery.

An elective with the Arizona Health Department put the fledgling medical epidemiologist in the right place at the right time when a new virus broke out in the Four Corners region. In his gold Jeep Wrangler Sahara, Smolinski bounced around Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico and Utah, visiting intensive care units while trying to discover why seemingly healthy young adults were dying of respiratory disease. He remembers investigators scratching out potential culprits with chalk on a blackboard.

“Hantavirus was not on the list because it had never caused a respiratory disease,” he said.

Normally associated with hemorrhagic fever with renal syndrome, hantavirus wasn’t even an issue in the Southwest, but lab tests confirmed that Smolinski and the rest of the team were indeed looking at a new strain of hantavirus. It was the perfect example of how humans, animals and the environment affect each other — interconnectedness known as One Health.

“Everything that I’ve done in my career has been focused on One Health,” Smolinski said. “It really stems back to hantavirus.”

A guiding principle

We — people, animals, plants and the ecosystems we live in — are all related, especially when it comes to infectious disease. This was demonstrated perfectly by the new hantavirus strain.

It broke down like this: Fall and winter of 1992 were extraordinarily rainy in the desert, even leading to floods, Smolinski said. The intense rainfall led to a proliferation of piñon nuts, the main food source for deer mice. The rodent population exploded with the abundant food supply. As people were exposed to the aerosolized droppings of infected mice, they got sick. 

“It was the perfect example of an environmental, animal and human interface leading to a newly emerging disease,” he said. “That was quite the experience and really kicked off my whole career in emerging infections.”

And how.

Smolinski went on to work as an epidemic intelligence officer at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; an advisor to the World Health Organization; a senior advisor to the U.S. surgeon general and assistant secretary of health; and the study director for a landmark 2003 Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences report, Microbial Threats to Health: the Emergence, Detection, and Response. The report scored a New York Times book review and was deemed to contain “more horrors per page than any Stephen King novel.”

WIRED magazine put him on the 2008 Smart List of 15 people the next president should listen to. While at the Nuclear Threat Initiative, a public charity led by CNN founder Ted Turner and former U.S. Senator Sam Nunn, Smolinski led the development of a regional disease surveillance system linking Israel, Jordan and the Palestinian Authority. Google also recruited him as a member of the start-up team for its newly created philanthropic arm, Google.org.

All that, and he’s given fashion advice to actress Kate Winslet.

As a scientific advisor on the set of the 2011 Stephen Soderbergh movie “Contagion” — a medical thriller that proved eerily prescient to what played out in real life eight years later during the pandemic — Smolinski worked to ensure accuracy, right down to the shoes Winslet’s epidemic intelligence officer character would wear. 

“She had a lot of very specific questions, to the point of what kind of wardrobe she’d be wearing in the movie,” Smolinski recalled. “I said, ‘Well, you don’t make a lot of money. Think Birkenstocks, not Prada.’”

Bonus fun fact: He became buddies with Jude Law during filming and still has the actor’s number in his contacts.

Pushing for proactive collaboration

Smolinski has witnessed plenty of outbreaks, both Hollywood-style fiction and the real-world kind. One thing is certain.

“We’ve got to be smarter about what we’re looking at,” he said. “We can’t just wait for human disease. We have got to be monitoring what’s going on in the wildlife and the animals, and we can get better at understanding what’s happening in the environment.”

COVID-19 sounded the alarm, yet five years later, people have hit the snooze button, Smolinski said. Complacency can’t set in once a crisis is averted, at least not in a world free of pandemics. 

“Human behavior is always going to be the biggest issue,” Smolinski said. “It’s the one thing we don’t have control over. What we call participatory surveillance is going to be a big effort of the academy.”

Participatory surveillance means people monitor their community and report what they see, receiving timely and trusted information back as a key element of reporting into such a system. Such proactive engagement has proven to be effective. 

More than a decade ago, one of Ending Pandemics’ successful projects was a free, national hotline in Cambodia for people to report health threats as well as receive health information and education. The joint effort with the ministries of health and agriculture meant teams could investigate reports quickly. When COVID hit, Cambodia had 1,000 cases and no deaths the first year of the pandemic, Smolinski noted. 

“These are the kinds of things that work,” said Smolinski, who also helped create the digital disease surveillance platform Global Flu View, which moved to the Global Health Institute two years ago.

Coming home

Smolinski bought his first house a year ago in Tucson.

“I always just rented because I was never home,” he said. 

Smolinski guesses he’s spent at least a quarter-century traveling half the year overseas, hopscotching the globe on a moment’s notice. Pretty crazy considering he didn’t set foot outside Michigan until he was 26 and came to Tucson.

The second of six kids in a family laser-focused on education, Smolinski grew up in a small town. His grade school years were spent with the same 12 students. His Catholic high school graduating class was made up of just 76 teens. Needless to say, heading off to study at the University of Michigan was a real eye opener. 

“I’ll never forget showing up for my first class in biology, and there were 500 people in the auditorium,” Smolinski said, smiling. “I’d never seen this many people in one class, so that was quite a culture shock.” 

It was another big leap for Smolinski to come to the Southwest. Though he’d never been to Arizona before, it felt right.

“I got off the plane in Tucson, and I just fell in love with it, instantly,” Smolinski said.

Back then there was no Drachman Building. Classes were held in a pink house on East Mabel Street. There was no Mel and Enid Zuckerman College of Public Health. Heck, just the idea of doctors specializing in public health was still catching on, he said. 

Things look, and are, a lot different now, and Smolinski said he’s excited to be back.

“It really is a great opportunity to bring something so important to the place where it all started for me,” he said.

He’s ready for the next chapter of his career and to truly — once and for all — end pandemics. 

Said Smolinski, “If we can help everybody understand the basics of how diseases emerge and the One Health movement, and the roles they can play to keep their workforces safer and be thinking about all of these things ahead of time, we’re going to be way ahead of the game when the next pandemic actually emerges.”