Center for
Global Health

Associate Scholar

Languages: English (native), Spanish (conversational and medical)

Bio statement

Dr. Julianne Burns, MD, is a Pediatric Infectious Disease Fellow at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. She completed her undergraduate and medical degrees at UC San Diego and conducted her residency in pediatrics at UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital Oakland. While an undergraduate, she interned at the Pan American Health Organization, where she analyzed global immunization policy-making. Dr. Burns is concurrently completing a Master of Science in Clinical Epidemiology at the University of Pennsylvania through support from a NIH T32 training grant. Her thesis involves analysis of risk factors associated with infections in pediatric cancer patients in the Dominican Republic.

Recent global health projects

Infection-related mortality in children diagnosed with cancer can be many times higher in low- and middle income countries than in high-income countries. My project aims to analyze risk factors associated with infection and poor outcomes in pediatric oncology patients in the Dominican Republic, with the goal of designing strategies to reduce morbidity and mortality. This endeavor is supported by CHOP Global Health Center and builds upon a long-term partnership between CHOP Chief of Oncology Dr. Stephen Hunger and pediatric oncologists at Hospital Infantil Dr. Robert Reid Cabral (HIRRC), the largest children's hospital in the Dominican Republic.

Effectively reducing the burden of vaccine-preventable diseases requires policies that are created through an evidence-based decision-making process. During an internship at the Pan American Health Organization under Dr. Jon Andrus, former PAHO Deputy Director, I analyzed the process by which countries of the Americas make national immunization policy decisions, utilizing responses to a questionnaire sent out by the WHO to Ministers of Health in countries around the world. Highlights of my findings were published in an Immunization Newsletter, and a formal report was published in the Pan American Journal of Public Health. This work provided important information for the ProVac Initiative, which provides countries of the Americas with technical support for evidence-based decision-making regarding the introduction of novel, and often expensive, vaccines, taking epidemiological data, infrastructure, and cost-effective analysis into consideration.

Selected publications

Burns JE, Mitrovich RC, Jauregui B, Ruiz Matus C, Andrus JK. Descriptive analysis of immunization policy decision making in the Americas. Pan American Journal of Public Health. 2009 Nov; 26(5): 398-404.

Last Updated: 27 January 2022