Dean received a PhD in biostatistics in 2014 with a dissertation on Surveillance methods for monitoring HIV incidence & drug resistance under the supervision of Marcello Pagano.

[6] In 2015 she joined the University of Florida Center for Statistics in Quantitative Infectious Diseases (CSQUID), where she worked as a postdoctoral researcher with Ira Longini.

This strategy randomly selects and vaccinates the contacts of Ebola virus cases, and organizes populations into delayed and immediate-vaccination clusters.

[12] In discussion with her alma mater Phillips Academy, Dean commented that the response of the research community to coronavirus disease was remarkable, “There are a lot of people working very hard on the same problem.

When asked whether the benchmarks to relax social distancing had been achieved, Dean remarked that not only had they not been reached, but they were not ambitious enough, “These are unprecedented times, and so we need to think on a scale that would previously be considered unimaginable”.

[15] In late April 2020, a study indicated that only 20% of people in New York City had been exposed to coronavirus disease, which is considerably below the level of infection required to achieve herd immunity.

[16] Dean and Carl Bergstrom wrote an opinion piece for The New York Times outlining the problems associated with politicians leading with policies of herd immunity.