Jacqueline Merrill is a public health nurse and public health services researcher. She completed a doctorate in nursing science with a concentration in public health informatics. Her public health experience includes six years with the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, Bureau of School Health and Office of Nursing and Quality Improvement. She is former project director at the Center for Health Policy at the School of Nursing, Columbia University where she participated in enumerating the public health workforce and identifying competencies for public health preparedness. At the Mailman School of Public Health she served as coordinator of the Center for Public Health Preparedness, one of a network of academic centers funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Her research interests are public health organizational systems, information management, workforce development and preparedness, information display and access, and risk communication. She is a recipient of a 2006 Public Health Scholar Award from the Pfizer Foundation. Her current research takes a complex systems approach toward understanding public health organizational processes by applying dynamic network analysis, a quantitative, descriptive technique for modeling organizations as interlocking informational networks.