Research Team

Dr. Abigail Koppes

Dr. Koppes joined the department of Chemical Engineering at Northeastern University in 2014 where her group, the Advanced Biosystems for Neuroengineering Laboratory, harnesses biochemical engineering methods to address challenges in nervous system disorders and dysfunction.
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Aimee Weiss

Dr. Alison Cohen

Dr. Cohen is an assistant professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at UCSF. She conducts community-driven, policy-relevant applied epidemiology research to document health inequities and identify and evaluate interventions to improve health and reduce inequities. She has a PhD in epidemiology and a MPH in epidemiology and biostatistics from UC Berkeley, and a AB in community health and education studies from Brown University.

Dr. Amy Blackstone (she/her)

Dr. Blackstone has been living with Long COVID since March 2020. She is a professor of sociology and a public sociologist who studies and writes about reproductive justice, adults who opt out of parenthood, workplace sexual harassment, power and politics, and activism and other forms of civic engagement.
Website
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André Saravia

André is an intensive care nurse technician living with Long Covid. He is the president of Long Covid Chile, a space for organization, political awareness, and institutional recognition of Long Covid within Chilean and global society. His work has driven the recognition of COVID as a public health problem in Chile, promoting the generation of integral policies that address health, social and economic impacts.

Anisha Sekar

Anisha Sekar is a fintech entrepreneur with over 10 years of experience in product management, user experience, and strategy. She received her BA in computer science from Brown University with a focus on applied mathematics and statistics. Her analysis has been cited in Reuters, the Washington Post, Marketplace and more.

Dr. Beth Pollack

Dr. Pollack is a Research Scientist at MIT & Visiting Scientist at Fred Hutch. She studies the overlaps & understudied pathologies in LC, ME/CFS, & related illnesses. She serves on NIH RECOVER working groups on LC therapeutics and clinical trials & chaired the NIH’s ME/CFS Research Roadmap subgroup on Less Studied Pathologies. Beth was named a US Leader by the Obama Foundation in 2024 and has been featured in NYT, Guardian, & others.

Charlie McCone (he/him)

Charlie is a San Francisco based Long Covid patient advocate and non-profit professional with a background in marketing, communications, fundraising, and organizing. He has worked in HIV/AIDS, environmental and urban planning, and political campaigns. His Long Covid advocacy efforts have been featured in the Washington Post, The Atlantic, TIME and PBS, and has written pieces in The Guardian, San Francisco Chronicle, and STAT news.

Dr. Chloé de Canson (she/her)

Chloé was an assistant professor of theoretical philosophy when she became bedbound with Long COVID (and subsequent ME, MCAS, and POTS) in 2022. Her interests include the philosophy of science and medicine, especially lay science. She holds a PhD in Philosophy from the London School of Economics.
www.chloedecanson.net

Dr. Chris McWilliams

Chris is a Research Fellow at the University of Bristol with a PhD in Complexity Sciences. His main research is on developing machine learning and decision support solutions for intensive care medicine. He is interested in interdisciplinary applied data science and currently leads a research project that uses AI to analyse the portrayal of gender in children's books.

Dr. Elisabeth Stelson

Beth is an assistant professor at Washington University in St. Louis - School of Public Health and is licensed social worker. A social epidemiologist, Beth has been a member of PLRC since 2020. Her Long COVID research focuses on helping people living with Long COVID to remain in the workforce, access care, and to reduce stigma around the disease. Beth holds a PhD in Population Health Sciences from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

Ezra Spier (he/him)

Ezra Spier is an Oakland, California-based operations and technology consultant who helps organizations thrive through difficult periods of growth. Ezra is the creator of Long Covid Studies (longcovidstudies.net), a website that helps people with Long Covid find opportunities to participate in research studies and clinical trials.
Website
longcovidstudies.net

Hannah Wei (she/her)

Hannah Wei has a background in cognitive science and computer science. Her work focuses on the intersection of global communities, frontier technology and user-centered design. She has led product design and research initiatives on the ground in Indonesia, Ghana, and Taiwan, and has worked with teams at Facebook, MIT Media Labs, Harvard Innovation Labs.

JD Davids (he/him)

JD is a chronically ill and disabled transgender writer, strategist and patient researcher with decades of work in world-changing social movements, policy and research advocacy and journalism. He founded and co-directed the national Long COVID Justice project, writes and hosts conversations for The Cranky Queer Guide to Chronic Illness, and is a member of the What Would an HIV Doula Do collective.

Jerry

Dr. Julia Moore Vogel (she/her)

Julia is a LC patient-researcher at Scripps Research, where she runs a decentralized clinical trial on tirzepatide for Long Covid. She also oversees inclusive health research efforts through the All of Us Research Program and others. Julia previously managed genomics initiatives at the New York Genome Center and The Rockefeller University. She has a PhD in Computational Biology and Medicine and an MBA from Cornell.

Kathleen P. Banks

Kathleen is a health systems researcher specializing in the translation of evidence to practice. She is internationally recognized for leading pivotal research to address disrespect and abuse during childbirth during her tenure at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. She is completing her Doctor of Public Health (DrPH) degree at the Boston University School of Public Health, focusing on access to patient-centered healthcare for Long COVID.

Kate Alexandria

Kate Alexandria is a Los Angeles-based writer and fundraising strategist with over a decade of experience in development and organizing. She has raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for clients in progressive spaces with comprehensive external affairs campaigns. She’s written about disability justice, institutional corruption, and more in outlets like Women’s Media Center, KnockLA, HuffPost, and beyond.

Katie Drackert (they/she)

Katie Drackert is an advocate creating a better world for people with Long COVID and IACCs by driving communal and institutional change. They have presented testimony to federal & statewide agencies, and pioneered a mutual aid clean air model in the South — Clear The Air ATX — which was the 2nd clean air organization in existence & the 1st in the region. They also develop resources on the intersections of post-viral illnesses & disability justice.

Dr. Lauren Shoemaker (she/her)

Lauren Shoemaker is an assistant professor at the University of Wyoming, where she runs an ecology lab and teaches quantitative biology. Her research combines mathematical modeling, complex systems science, experiments, and statistics to uncover the mechanisms that structure disease dynamics and ecosystem responses to human impacts.

Leo Liu (he/him)

Leo Liu is a researcher, experimentalist, and data scientist who designs randomized controlled trials primarily studying civic engagement, political persuasion, advocacy, and political activism. He lives in Washington, DC and is living with Long Covid and POTS.

Lúcia

Lúcia is an advocate and researcher with a BA from Barnard College at Columbia University. A first generation American, she previously worked as a communications and development specialist across multiple business sectors, internationally. She is also a patient representative for ME/CFS and other infection-associated chronic condition (IACC) organizations.

Dr. Margaret O’Hara

Dr. O'Hara is a founder of the Long Covid Support group and runs the group's Research Involvement Consultancy, which provides patient involvement to the research community in the UK. She is a scientist by profession and was working as a Patient Involvement in Research Lead in the NHS when she contracted Long Covid. She has co-authored multiple papers on LC, presented at international conferences, and co-authored clinical practice guidelines.

María Richardson (ella/she/ her)

María Richardson is a bilingual writer and educator from Monterrey, Mexico, currently living in Mexico City. She has a BA in Humanities from Yale and an MFA in Creative Writing from The New School and worked briefly as a museum educator and later as an EFL teacher. María has had an ME diagnosis since 2015 and POTS since 2018 but experienced symptoms long before then.
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Dr. Megan Fitzgerald

Dr. Megan Fitzgerald holds a PhD in Neuroscience and has a background in human neuroanatomy, developmental neuroscience, and stem cell research. She became ill with COVID in March of 2020.

Michael Sieverts

Michael has a background in science and technology policy. He has held senior positions at the National Science Foundation and has also worked for the Congressional Budget Office.
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Norio Honjo

Norio is an advocate with a BA in Social Science from the University of Waseda in Tokyo.
He has been a Long Covid patient since February 2020.
He founded the Japanese Long Covid Team (JLT) to raise awareness in Japan about the impact of Long Covid.

Philippe Lunardelli

Rachel Robles (she/her)

Rachel is a master's student studying AI in Medicine at the University of Bern, where she is currently writing her thesis about the impact of infections on symptom progression. She holds a B.Sc in Operations Research and Information Engineering from Cornell University and has experience in business intelligence within the tech industry.

Sam Rhodehamel

Sam is a California-based public-serving communicator and patient advocate with a BA in Sociology and an MA in Public Relations & Marketing from the University of London.

Sanghoon Bae

Dr. Sanghoon Bae holds a doctorate in Regenerative Medicine and previously served at Weill Cornell Medicine. After his first encounter with Long COVID in early 2020, a reinfection in October 2025 led to recurring symptoms that necessitated his departure from his position. He is now dedicated to leveraging his scientific background to drive academic advancement and improve public awareness for Long COVID treatment.

Dr. Signe Redfield

Dr. Redfield received her Ph.D. and MS in Electrical Engineering from the University of Florida, and a BA in General Engineering from Johns Hopkins University.
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Teresa Akintonwa

Teresa is the founder and president of Black COVID Survivors, an organization that provides Black patient survivors with culturally competent resources to reduce disease transmission, increase participation in health research, and strategies for obtaining equitable and proper treatment from providers. She is an educator with over 25 years of extensive experience, and has had Long COVID since February 2020.

Tess Falor

Dr. Falor holds a PhD in Earth and Planetary Science from UC Berkeley. Motivated by her own complex health conditions, she changed her career to work on medical research and patient advocacy. She is cofounder of the community science self-experimentation project, RemissionBiome.org. She’s a patient representative on multiple ME/CFS and LC research projects and is a member of the PLRC Patient-Generated Hypotheses Journal team.

Tessa D. Green

Dr. Green is a computational biologist who specializes in machine learning for single-cell immunology and perturbation biology. She earned her PhD in Biophysics from Harvard Medical School, and now works in Biotech in Boston, MA.
Website

Vee Copeland

V. Copeland is a social worker working at the intersection of technology and social policy. Her work is rooted in Black Feminist thought and Disability Justice. She is the founder of the Abolitionist Perspectives in Social Work, a peer-reviewed, open-access scholarly journal dedicated to the development and dissemination of abolitionist values, theory, and praxis in social work. She has had Long Covid since 2022.

Dr. Yochai Re’em