Melissa Nolan is a medical doctor and a professor of epidemiology at Arnold School of Public Health at the University of South Carolina. "When you educate people, they're not as afraid. And they can understand what their personal risk is."

Nolan, who worked as a disease investigator at Texas Children's Hospital during the H1N1 outbreak in 2009, along with epidemiologist Peter Krause of the Yale School of Public Health, helped identify and define some of the key terms related to the new infectious disease.