Jack Pepper to discuss 'Athens County COVID-19 Pandemic Response: Community Resilience, Partnerships and a Little Luck' on Oct. 28

The Geography Department Professional Speaker Series features Jack Pepper discussing the "Athens County COVID-19 Pandemic Response: Community Resilience, Partnerships and a Little Luck,” on Friday, Oct. 28, at 3 p.m. in Clippinger 119.

Pepper, administrator of the Athens City-County Health Department, is an Ohio University graduate, having earned a B.S. in Geography-Cartography in 2001 from the College of Arts and Sciences.

His talk is open to the public as well as OHIO students, faculty and staff.

The speaker series, funded by the College of Arts and Sciences Seminar Fund, invites high-achieving geography alumni in practical professional fields to share valuable insights on current topics, including environment, urban planning, and climate change.

Since 2002, the CDC's Public Health Emergency Preparedness Cooperative Agreement has provided financial assistance to public health departments across the nation. These dollars are designed to help local health departments build and strengthen their abilities to effectively respond to a range of public health threats, including infectious diseases. Within months of the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the majority of those planning documents had been abandoned and local public health departments across the country were managing the greatest infectious disease crisis since the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic “on the fly,” Pepper said in an abstract for his talk.

Pepper's talk will feature a chronological assessment of the response efforts in Athens County with a particular focus on the resilience of the Athens community, the importance of established local partnerships and the good fortune of a new Heritage College of Osteopathic Medicine facility.

In his role as administrator of the Athens City-County Health Department, Pepper is responsible for all of the day-to-day operations of the health department but focuses the majority of his time of ensuring quality services that improve health outcomes for Athens County residents. Before taking on the administrator role, he worked as the department's director of environmental health for 13 years.

Pepper also is an adjunct faculty member for the Department of Social and Public Health at Ohio University and is involved with a number of local and statewide initiatives, boards and commissions.

For more information, please contact Yeong Kim, associate professor of geography in the College of Arts and Sciences, at kimy1@ohio.edu.

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