Ms. Paige Peterson is a Member of the National Council on U.S.-Arab Relations Board of Directors. She has contributed photo essays on Oman, Al-Ula and Madain Saleh, and the Old City of Jeddah for the National Council’s Arabia, the Gulf, and the GCC blog. In 2015, Ms. Peterson wrote a travelogue of a visit to Saudi Arabia for the New York Social Diary online magazine, where she is a contributing photojournalist. There, she recently produced a two-part interview with Dr. Jay Levy, a virologist, exploring the public health implications of the pandemic affecting the global community. Links to the interview are below.

This illustration, created at the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, reveals ultrastructural morphology exhibited by coronaviruses. A novel coronavirus, named Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), was identified as the cause of an outbreak of respiratory illness first detected in Wuhan, China in 2019. The illness caused by this virus has been named coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19).

Part 1: Interview with Dr. Jay Levy, University of California, San Francisco Professor of Medicine

Part 2: Interview with Dr. Jay Levy, University of California, San Francisco Professor of Medicine

Ms. Paige Peterson is a Member of the National Council on U.S.-Arab Relations Board of Directors. She has contributed photo essays on Oman, Al-Ula and Madain Saleh, and the Old City of Jeddah for the National Council’s Arabia, the Gulf, and the GCC blog. In 2015, Ms. Peterson wrote a travelogue of a visit to Saudi Arabia for the New York Social Diary online magazine, where she is a contributing photojournalist. There, she recently published a photo essay highlighting the work of Dr. Laurie Marker and the Cheetah Conservation Fund (CCF) in Otjiwarongo, Namibia. Ms. Peterson serves as the CCF’s Ambassador to the Middle East. A link to the essay is below.

A century ago, there were 100,000 cheetahs in the wild. Today, there are fewer than 7,500. Namibia has about 1,500, more than any other country in Africa. Otjiwarongo, the town where Cheetah Conservation Fund is based, is known as “The Cheetah Capital of the World.”

The Legend of the Cheetah and their Savior, Dr. Laurie Marker of Cheetah Conservation Fund