TCNJ

25 FALL 2018 Not long after Evelyn Pereira started working at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, eight people were hospitalized — including two people who died — from listeriosis, an infection caused by contaminated food. It was Pereira's job to help find the source of contamination and to inform consumers what to do. The outbreak was traced to a manufacturer of soft raw-milk cheese, and a recall was ordered. "That was when the training wheels came off," she says about the Listeria outbreak in March 2017. "The first time I saw my work on CNN, I was super excited. But now I've gotten used to it." She grew up in North Bergen, New Jersey, the youngest of three children of a father from El Salvador and a mother from Ecuador. "In high school, I was used to being one of the highest performing students, and at TCNJ it wasn't like that," she says. "My high school experience didn't prepare me for college. The EOF summer program showed me there was a bigger learning curve than I thought there would be." She majored in biology and women's and gender studies, and spent two summers at a pharmaceutical company's research lab in Massachusetts with plans to be a doctor. But then she traveled to South Africa with a public health communication class and saw "that there were other options than just being a doctor," she says. She started working for the FDA while earning a master's in public health at George Washington University. Now, as an interdisciplinary scientist on a team that investigates foodborne outbreaks, she's especially popular among her friends when, say, contaminated romaine lettuce or eggs are in the news, as they have been lately. "They text and call me to ask, 'What should I not eat?'" she says. EVELYN PEREIRA '14 FDA FOOD SAFETY BULLHORN

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