When global health studies fall short on participants, critical research can stall. That’s the challenge George Mason PhD graduate Kevin Cevasco is tackling through his postdoctoral work at the University of Florida’s One Health Center for Excellence.
Backed by the Gates Foundation, Cevasco and his colleagues aim to improve how infectious-disease studies across Africa enroll participants. “The big problem is, if you don’t recruit enough people in a clinical trial, all that time and money go to waste,” Cevasco said. “You end up with what’s called uninformative research—delaying potentially valuable health interventions for the people who need them.”
Working closely with epidemiology faculty, Cevasco is conducting a thorough review of an infectious disease recruiting template developed by the Gates Foundation team, known as Design, Analyze, Communicate (DAC). He’s assessing its evidence base and recommending ways to improve it, with the aim of bolstering the quality of global health research.
“The process reminds me of my engineering days,” Cevasco said, referring to his former career path. “They took a garage, start-up mentality of let’s get together, start tinkering, and improve the system.”
Cevasco also recently taught a graduate seminar on applied One Health—a framework linking human, animal, and environmental health—examining an avian influenza outbreak in the United Kingdom. “We used case-study approaches to look at what scientists knew versus what the public thought was happening,” he said. “Understanding that public perception gap is just as important as managing a disease outbreak.”
For that class, Cevasco drew upon his MBA experience at Virginia Tech, analyzing Harvard Business School cases. Before his shift to public health, Cevasco spent years working in information technology, including consulting and system design roles for large technology firms such as IBM.
The turning point came through volunteering as chair of Friends of Patients at the NIH, where he saw families struggling to afford basic needs while undergoing treatment at the nation’s premier research hospital.
“With a tear down my cheek, I approved a rent check for a family about to lose their home,” he recalled. “That’s when I emotionally grasped the contradiction between world-class NIH research and the dire health-care-driven financial distress many American families face.”
The experience pulled Cevasco back to George Mason, where he’d earned a computer science degree years earlier, to pursue both an MPH (‘20) and a PhD in epidemiology (‘24).
“My adviser [Amira Roess] encouraged me to bring my business and tech background and expertise into public health,” Cevasco said. “She let me shape my electives and my research, which is what led me to digital health work.”
Cevasco’s studies on e-health adoption and vaccine decision-making became the foundation for his doctoral dissertation, and in 2021 he was named the College of Public Health’s Alumni of the Year.
Today, as his Gates-funded project moves toward publication, Cevasco remains focused on bridging disciplines to make health research more effective. He views the field’s recent turbulence with perspective: “Support for public health is cyclical,” he said. “It feels rough now, but the need will return, and we have to be ready for that.”
Learn more about the Public Health PhD and Health Services Research PhD programs at the George Mason College of Public Health.