first on decorahnews.com: From Decorah High School to the Center for Disease Control

When Michelle Williams Dynes was a student at Decorah High School in 1993, high school band teacher Jim Fritz asked her what kind of career she was interested in.  "Either law or health care," she replied.  "I think you should do health care," he replied. Little did either know that one day she would be working at the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta and would be right in the middle of the CDC's response to the Ebola outbreak.

Michelle enrolled at Luther College after graduating in 1993 from DHS, earning a nursing degree in 1997. She then got a Master's Degree in nursing at Yale, worked at Mayo Clinic in Rochester for seven years and then eventually earned a PhD from Emory University in Atlanta.  That led her to the CDC, where she was hired as an Epidemic Intelligence Service Epidemiologist a year and a half ago.

Dynes tells decorahnews.com that she has been traveling to a lot of countries since being hired by the CDC.  She spent time at a refugee camp in Jordan, traveled to Tanzania and has made several trips to Haiti.  Her field of specialty is reproductive health issues, but as an employee of the EIS team, she gets sent wherever she is needed.

Two months ago she was sent to Sierra Leone to help handle the response to the Ebola outbreak there. She spent five and a half weeks in the country, with several weeks responding to the Ebola epidemic in the Kenema district of Sierra Leone, where more than 20 nurses had died from Ebola.

Dynes stressed to decorahnews.com that she has been back in the United States for more than the 21 day incubation period for Ebola and is symptom free.  However, she says there's a "good chance" that she will be sent back to Sierra Leone.  She's hoping that her trip to Africa will be scheduled after the first of the year. That would allow her to spend time with family members over the holidays.  Her sister, Molly Holkesvik,is a teacher at Decorah High School and she still has many relatives living in the Decorah area.