Dr. Charity Dean (MD/MPH 2005 Graduate), former Assistant Director at the California Department of Public Health and current CEO and co-founder of The Public Health Company, was recently highlighted for her public health insight in author Michael Lewis' 2021 New York Times bestseller The Premonition: A Pandemic Story. Dr. Dean was one of the book's three main protagonists profiled by Lewis, who highlighted her work in successfully responding to a Meningitis B outbreak on the UCSB college campus while a Public Health Officer for Santa Barbara County and later in January 2020, when she sounded the alarm predicting the exponential growth of Covid-19, despite pushback from officials in both cases.
