Dr. Mark Kortepeter is a professor in the Department of Epidemiology, College of Public Health, at the University of Nebraska Medical Center and a retired army colonel with more than twenty-five years of service. He is an expert in germ warfare defense and has held multiple leadership roles at the nation’s largest containment laboratory dedicated to biological warfare defense, the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID). He is the author of Inside the Hot Zone: A Soldier on the Front Lines of Biological Warfare (Potomac Books, 2020)