Dr. Katelyn Jetelina, founder of Your Local Epidemiologist, to deliver Gillings School’s 2025 Commencement address
January 28, 2025
“Public health is everywhere. It touches every aspect of our lives. My goal is to help you see it, understand it and use it.”
— Dr. Katelyn Jetelina, Your Local Epidemiologist founder and CEO
Your Local Epidemiologist — or YLE for short — is a free newsletter that delivers “translated” evidence-based public health science twice a week to 310,000 inboxes. From vaccine best practices to nutrition, from the dangers of wildfires smoke to federal health policy, Dr. Katelyn Jetelina and her team cover complex public health issues, disprove rumors and translate ever-evolving science into straightforward insights that help readers make informed choices about their health in a timely manner.

Dr. Katelyn Jetelina
On May 10, at the 2025 Commencement celebration of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Gillings School of Global Public Health, Jetelina will share insights drawn from nearly five years of creating public health communications that have reached more than 500 million readers in 132 countries.
“YLE was born in March 2020 when I was teaching at the University of Texas Health Science Center,” she says. “People were desperate for information about this novel coronavirus, and my dean asked me to send a daily update to our school. It was usually just a couple sentences and a few ugly Excel graphs, but students started asking me to post online instead of in an internal email so they could share the message more easily on social media.”
“I never got one hour of formal education on science communication, but I loved working with students and translating public health information for them,” she adds. “I think that passion is why I was asked to start the newsletter, and why it’s become the trusted resource it is today.”
Jetelina holds a master’s degree in public health and a doctoral degree in epidemiology and biostatistics. She currently works as an epidemiologist, data scientist and consultant to organizations like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and Resolve to Save Lives in addition to managing YLE with a team of fifteen other experts and administrators.
She initially thought the public-facing newsletter would primarily reach “Joe on the corner,” or maybe moms considering which vaccinations to give their young children. And it does, but it turns out the audience is mostly made up of doctoral and medical degree holders whose employment runs the gamut.
“What I’ve learned,” she says, “is that our readers tend to be leaders within their local communities: doctors, businesspeople, professors, members of public health departments and so on. They take our content and translate and curate it themselves to share in turn with their patients, colleagues and students. In that way, the information eventually does reach Joe on the corner. YLE is just one small node in a massive grassroots information system. Our goal is to equip as many trusted messengers as possible with factual, timely and understandable health information.”
On that note, Jetelina is no stranger to the perils of being vocal online in world rife with mis- and disinformation. She used to host YLE on Facebook, but her page was hacked in 2021. All her content and her audience of more than 400,000 people was out of reach. After that experience, she switched hosting sites and dove right back into the fray. Over the years, she has been subject to everything from death threats to doxing to a “thousand papercuts from colleagues.”
“Succeeding in this forum comes down to courage,” says the mother of two. “You have to be willing to put your neck out there and think innovatively in the name of spreading helpful, evidence-based content. You have to deeply believe in the values of public health and live up to them, which requires listening and community engagement — even when, or especially when, someone disagrees. Public health is, above all, a team sport. I’ve had incredible success, but I can’t do any of this alone.”
YLE recently surpassed 300,000 subscribers — a number that floors Jetelina. She once planned to be a clinician, then pivoted to public health when she realized the field treats patients millions at a time instead of individually. After earning her doctoral degree, she worked for the World Health Organization in Geneva, then the townships in South Africa, before landing a tenure-track faculty position and starting a research lab at UT.
“My career has been a squiggly line,” she laughs. “I was going for tenure when COVID hit. Next thing I knew, I had started YLE and Dr. Rochelle Walensky of the CDC was calling my personal cell phone and asking me to support her organization in science translation.”
“It was an incredibly hard decision to leave teaching and research behind, but my goal has always been to make the largest possible positive impact,” Jetelina says. “In academia, practice isn’t always appreciated, but I can see the numbers. When one of my peer-reviewed articles gets seven views and one issue of my newsletter gets a million views, the value of Your Local Epidemiologist is crystal clear.”
“I think Katelyn’s voice and her mission to equip trusted messengers with accurate health information will absolutely resonate with our graduating students,” shares Gillings School Dean Dr. Nancy Messonnier. “I’m so excited to welcome her to campus this spring.”
Subscribe to YLE and follow their posts on Instagram.
Contact the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health communications team at sphcomm@unc.edu.