In many ways, DefeatDD is a labor of love. Much like the integrated approach for which we so passionately advocate, we each offer unique contributions and a slice of our time to the larger effort. We’re a team of communicators that span a whole host of PATH projects, but DefeatDD holds a special place in our hearts.
We may tease Eileen for color-coding her emails and calendar appointments, but we can’t really blame her. She is the Communications & Advocacy Director of PATH’s Center for Vaccine Innovation and Access (CVIA) and DefeatDD’s spirit guide. We’re also fairly confident she was a famous film critic in a former life. This word nerd’s impressive career history in media and communications, along with her rotating office cube exhibit of original magnetic poetry, points to her penchant for puns, punctuation, and parsing. In her spare time, you might catch this Anglophile donning a fascinator and catching up on celebrity gossip or the latest critically-acclaimed fiction read with her book club.
Hope might try to tell you to “pay no attention to that man behind the curtain” (The Wizard of Oz) because one of her many talents is quoting movie lines—and entire chunks of dialogue. But better to pay no attention if she tries that line, because she’s been behind the DefeatDD digital curtain from day 1, these days focusing on content strategy. Hope joined the team on April Fools’ Day, 2009, hailing from Erie, PA, where one of her claims to fame was winning the Erie Times News Spelling Bee. She thinks the workday starts way too early, that sunshine is suspect, and food is mandatory at Happy Hour. Our only quibble is that with Hope around, we never get a chance to say, “What we’ve got here is…a failure to communicate.” (Cool Hand Luke).