Colleen Kraft

Colleen S. Kraft is an infectious disease physician, associate professor in the Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine, and the director of the Clinical Virology Research Laboratory at Emory University School of Medicine. In 2014, she led Emory University Hospital's effort to treat and care for Ebola virus disease patients and is currently working to address the COVID-19 pandemic in Georgia. She currently serves on Georgia's COVID-19 task force.

Emory University Hospital received the first patient with Ebola virus disease, a missionary and physician named Kent Brantly, on August 2, 2014, followed by three patients with the disease, including the physician Ian Crozier. During that time, she worked on developing a protocol for the first known successful delivery of renal replacement therapy to treat kidney failure in Ebola patients. Kraft is a co-PI for the National Ebola Training and Education Center, a federally funded collaborative between Emory University, Nebraska Medicine, and New York Health and Hospital-Bellevue that is working to address gaps in outbreak preparedness. As a result, Emory's Serious Communicable Diseases Unit remains prepared to treat Ebola patients.

Kraft became an assistant professor at Emory University School of Medicine in 2010 and was promoted to associate professor in 2016. She became the Associate Chief Medical Officer of Emory University Hospital in January 2020. Her research interests include fecal microbiota transplants, building a large solid organ transplant population at Emory University Hospital to treat antibiotic resistant and hospital-acquired infections of Clostridioides difficile. In addition, she has both studied and advanced clinical care of Ebola virus disease and COVID-19 disease 2019.

Kraft received her Bachelor of Arts degree from Taylor University in Biology with a pre-medicine concentration in 1998. She then attended Indiana University School of Medicine, where she received her Doctor of Medicine degree in 2002. She then performed her residency in Internal Medicine and fellowship in Infectious Disease and Medical Microbiology at Emory University. She later received her Master of Science in clinical research from Emory University in 2013.