Jill earned her nursing degree from Georgia State University and has over thirty years of bedside nursing experience in emergency and critical care, beginning in a rural critical access hospital and then moving to more urban emergency departments before joining Emory in 2003. At Emory, she has worked in medical and respiratory intensive care units and clinical research.

Jill has been a member of Emory’s Serious Communicable Disease Unit for more than fifteen years and cared for all four of Emory’s Ebola virus disease patients. During her biocontainment unit experience, Jill developed an acute interest in ensuring that clinicians of all kinds can safely do their work. That passion has led to a strong relationship with clinical research, NIOSH, and the National Personal Protective Technologies Laboratory, as well as involvement with PPE standards organizations such as ASTM. She also serves as the in-person education lead for NETEC, the National Emerging Special Pathogens Training and Education Center, a CDC funded organization charged with improving the readiness of the US healthcare system for infectious pathogens. For NETEC, Jill helped create the frontline education emphasizing the importance of early identification and isolation of potential pathogens and delivered that content to over a thousand US healthcare workers.

Jill served as a judge in this year’s BARDA mask challenge, argued in favor of the development of eye protection standards against blood and other potentially infectious materials, and sponsors biomedical engineering students from Ga Tech in their capstone projects. She is currently working on grants involving barrier face coverings and infection prevention for bedside clinicians through Emory’s Healthcare and Human Factors Lab.