Karen Torghele is an epidemiologist who spent most of her career at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and The Task Force for Global Health in Atlanta, Georgia. She was then recruited to design and conduct oral histories related to the early years of the CDC and for the Oral History of Polio Project. The eighty video recordings of her interviews are included in The Global Health Chronicles website, which the CDC Museum oversees. Torghele is a member of Biographers International and has utilized its podcasts and Zoom sessions to learn the nuances of writing biographies. She participates in two writing groups through Biographers International, which are immensely helpful and rewarding. When not writing, she enjoys playing cello in the Atlanta Musicians’ Orchestra and adding to her lifetime bird-spotting list.
Her first book is a biography of the oral polio vaccine developer, Albert Sabin.
Albert Sabin: The Life of a Polio Vaccine Pioneer (Yale University Press, June 2026)