Jane Meza, PhD, discussing developing COVID-19 contact tracing at UNO and UNMC

16 January 2023

Jane Meza: And then one day we got a call over at UNO from the Health Department and they said, “We're going to need you to do contact tracing.” That was something that we were—I knew something about contact tracing, but certainly was something that I had never done and weren't really prepared to stand that up right away, but we did it. We stood up contact tracing at UNO for all of our students, because the idea was that you know as a campus better when students say they went to their math class and then they went to their engineering class. Then UNMC started to do some testing here, and I think we had like one day where people could come get tested and that was a big success. Then we realized that we need to have testing at UNO, and so we set up a testing center at UNO. Those are things I'd never done before. I never thought in a million years I would be doing this. But what was really great about it is I knew all the people at UNMC that were doing this. Talked to Dr. Hinrichs and Tony Sambol and Teresa Fowler, and next thing you knew we had a testing center set up at UNO, so that's kind of what I did at UNO. Then one day, I got a call that said Ted was looking to retire. Would I be interested in doing this at UNMC? I thought, “Well, it does make sense since I know a lot about what Ted is doing, and I know what we're doing at UNO,” so I said yes. Then for a while, I was the interim executive director for health security at both UNO and UNMC, and also associate vice chancellor for global engagement at both institutions, and that was a lot.

From the McGoogan Health Sciences Library Special Collections and Archives