On Tuesday Sept. 23, the Center for Disease Control (CDC) released a report projecting the number of Ebola cases to surpass one million by January 2015 without intervention. And just this week, the first known case of Ebola was discovered in the US.

Thankfully, agencies and experts around the world are working on solutions. But one with a solution already in action is right in our backyard. Local Emmy-winning journalist turned professor, Steven King, was the first call of friend and former colleague Ken Harper of the Newhouse Center for Global Engagement at Syracuse University. Harper was asked by a colleague in Liberia to design a tool to combat the deadly disease’s spread.

  • WRALTechWire’s report on King’s project: UNC team gives Ebola fight a boost

And King happened to be skilled in the tool of choice. Visualized data—or data represented in charts, tables or other visually enticing and easily understood formats.

If you don’t know King or the team’s mission, it might seem strange that a former journalist without any formal medical training would be asked to create a tool to better understand the disease’s current and potential impact. But King was the perfect choice, because the tool he and the team designed, Ebolainliberia.org, is already proving to be a game changer in the fight against Ebola.

Why King?

Perhaps the ability to be constantly engaged in several projects simultaneously is in a journalist’s blood — or maybe it’s just King— but since I met him just over two years ago, I’ve not yet seen him stop to come up for air. Every time I speak with him, he’s working on a new project—like his Knight Foundation grant-funded app FilmSync—or taken a new leadership role, like earlier this year when he became an elder at his church. King is also deeply committed and immersed in his day job at UNC’s School of Journalism and Mass Communications—teaching the next generation of journalists to use new and emerging technologies to tell stories in innovative ways. And he does it all while raising two energetic boys under five with his wife of 10 years.

So, I wasn’t all that surprised in early September when my friend Amy King (Steven’s wife), told me her husband had been pulling all-nighters for over a week to finish a very important project. But my eyebrows rose a bit when I found out the topic of King’s new project was Ebola. Soon after, I saw the finished Ebolainliberia.org and I called King to chat about the site, why he got involved, and what he and the team hopes it will become.

You can read the full story at ExitEvent.

ExitEvent is a news partner of WRAL TechWire.