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As devastating and difficult as the COVID-19 pandemic has been, Emily Sargent, ’18, is sure of one thing in her role as a Public Health Advisor serving on the COVID-19 Response at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“It is an honor to be working in this job,” she says.

Sargent spent years preparing for her CDC role, which includes managing operations for a task force that collects and analyzes public health data to help direct the ongoing federal response to the COVID-19 crisis. As an undergraduate majoring in criminal justice at Indiana University in Bloomington, Sargent was part of a student-run emergency medical services team and became an emergency medical technician (EMT), where she discovered the area of health law.

“I realized that was going to be my true passion,” she says. “I was fortunate to be admitted to IU McKinney, which has a top health law program and offered me the opportunity to learn from leaders in my field. I greatly appreciated the devoted faculty and being at the center of everything in Indianapolis, especially since my focus was on government and policy.”

During her second year of law school, Sargent committed to the J.D./M.P.H. dual degree program with the IU Fairbanks School of Public Health and embarked on a series of externships that took her from St. Francis Hospital to the Indiana State Department of Health and the Indiana Region of the American Red Cross.

Sargent was in the inaugural class of Health Law Scholars at IU McKinney, where she also volunteered with the IU Student Outreach Clinic, and as a member of the IUPUI Public Health Corps, working on assignments that include researching sexual harassment/sexual assault laws for the Indiana Coalition Against Domestic Violence.

After law school—and as COVID-19 reached Indiana in early 2020—Sargent was working at the Indiana State Department of Health in public health emergency preparedness. As COVID cases began being reported and state health officials activated the emergency operations center, Sargent recalls that soon, “things exploded.”

In her work with the Red Cross, Sargent had helped with emergency responses to major flooding in West Virginia and a tornado outbreak in Kokomo, but the COVID-19 response was a new, historic level, she says.

Sargent’s office at the Indiana Department of Health routinely managed federal grants for emergency preparedness, but in a matter of weeks the amount tripled. Coordinating the statewide COVID-19 response soon drew in not only the 12-person team Sargent worked on, but, eventually, several entities of state government, and involved working with county and local health departments in every corner of Indiana.

In August 2020, Sargent left the Indiana State Department of Health to join the federal response at the CDC.

“For someone who is passionate about this particular area of law and public health, it is the experience of a lifetime,” Sargent says. “I believe we will see a new era of emergency preparedness laws following this pandemic, similar to the policy changes that occurred after the terrorist attacks on 9/11 and after Hurricane Katrina.”

Sargent says that her law school education, combined with her master’s in public health, have provided a crucial knowledge base for her current role at the CDC as the COVID-19 crisis continues to evolve.

“People get frustrated working in government, and the politics and bureaucracy can be difficult,” she says. “But that’s why I want to work in this space. It is hard, yet it is an honor to be working for the American taxpayer. I felt that way when I worked in Indiana, and I feel that way now, working for all U.S. citizens. That’s what I love about government work.”