Rebekah Jones (born July 25, 1989) is an American geographer, data scientist, and activist. She managed the team that created the Florida Department of Health's COVID-19 dashboard using ArcGIS software. She was fired from her position in May 2020 for repeated insubordination. In May 2021, she was granted whistleblower protections while the state investigated her allegations.
In May 2022, Florida's Office of Inspector General exonerated the state health officials, finding her claims against the DOH to be unsubstantiated or unfounded. In December 2022, she signed a deferred prosecution agreement admitting guilt to unauthorized use of the state's emergency alert system on November 10, 2020, which had resulted in her home being searched under warrant by state police in December 2020.
In the 2022 U.S. House of Representatives elections in Florida, Jones was the Democratic Party nominee against Matt Gaetz for Florida's 1st congressional district; she was defeated on November 8, 2022.
Early life and education
Jones was born in Windber, Pennsylvania, to blue-collar parents. At the age of nine, her family moved to Wiggins, Mississippi, where she spent most of her childhood. She grew up poor, often housing and food insecure. Jones graduated from Stone High School in 2007, after missing months of school due to the school's destruction during Hurricane Katrina in 2005. She says her experiences in Katrina made her interested in natural disasters. In her junior year, Jones was removed from class for refusing to stand for the Pledge of Allegiance and led other students to do the same after learning from civil liberties groups she was acting within her rights.
Jones graduated cum laude from the S. I. Newhouse School of Public Communications and Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University with dual degrees in geography and journalism in 2012.
In 2014, she received a master's degree in geography and a minor in mass communication from Louisiana State University, where she won an award the same year from the Association of American Geographers. In 2015, her research titled Quantifying Extreme Weather Event Impacts on the Northern Gulf Coast Using Landsat Imagery was published in the Journal of Coastal Research.
Jones was a graduate student in the Department of Geography at Florida State University from 2016 through 2018, where she worked on a doctoral dissertation entitled Using Native American Sitescapes to Extend the North American Paleotempestological Record Through Coupled Remote Sensing and Climatological Analysis.
Florida Department of Health
In September 2018, she became a geographic information system (GIS) analyst at Florida Department of Health (DOH) in Tallahassee and worked on the agency's emergency response team during Hurricane Michael and Hurricane Dorian. Jones performed analysis and modeling of mapping and surveillance data to provide information to the public and state officials used to coordinate disaster response, like the organization of patient movement to open beds between interstate hospitals. In November 2019, she was appointed to a manager role within GIS handling analysis and tracking of environmental health data and health services. She managed the team of data scientists and public health officers that used Esri's ArcGIS software to create the widely praised Florida Department of Health's COVID-19 dashboard.