Virginia Chu began her journey with CORE at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. “I started as a mobile COVID-19 tester fresh out of graduate school and helped set the groundwork for our mobile vaccination roll out in Georgia. It felt great to be a part of public health action, especially in my community. Across the organization, we reached nearly 7 million with tests and nearly 3 million with vaccines from our COVID-19 programs.”   

While the tragic Haiti earthquake in 2010 put CORE—a then-new and agile emergency response organization on the map— the global COVID-19 pandemic highlighted our capacity to fill a massive worldwide gap in addressing community needs within existing healthcare systems and infrastructure. It was during this unprecedented crisis that CORE, comprised of hundreds of individuals like Virginia, decided to take this massive public health emergency head on. And for Virginia, that meant leaning into numbers and data.   

With an educational background in public health, a PhD in Biomedical Science and an MSPH in Epidemiology, Virginia has always been drawn to the study of infectious diseases, wanting to better understand how they can infect indiscriminately, and learn more about the communities they impact most and why. She joined CORE looking to gain more hands-on skills to support vulnerable communities impacted by disaster, in any way possible.   

As the Director of Program Data at CORE, Virginia plays a key role in demonstrating the numerical impact of CORE’s humanitarian work. As CORE delivers a broad range of programs and emergency responses in the U.S. and around the world, Virginia’s work is critical in ensuring the accurate collection and tracking of data from the field, as well as aggregating the organizational-level impact. Virginia and her team have been working hard to strengthen CORE’s internal processes of data collection, including providing training, templates, and program design solutions to empower the work of our field colleagues. For her, it is the context around data that gives numbers a story worth highlighting; the people and the narratives behind the data are essential in building out and maintaining effective programs.