Dr. Adalja is a Senior Scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, an Adjunct Assistant Professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, and an Affiliate of the Johns Hopkins Center for Global Health. His work is focused on emerging infectious disease, pandemic preparedness, and biosecurity.

Dr. Adalja has served on US government panels tasked with developing guidelines for the treatment of plague, botulism, and anthrax in mass casualty settings, the system of care for infectious disease emergencies, and a National Academies steering committee for diagnostic excellence. He also served as an external advisor to the New York City Health + Hospitals Emergency Management Highly Infectious Disease training program and on a US Federal Emergency Management Agency working group on nuclear disaster recovery. He is a spokesperson for the Infectious Diseases Society of America; he previously served on their public health and diagnostics committees and their precision medicine working group. Dr. Adalja is a member of the American College of Emergency Physicians Pennsylvania Chapter's EMS & Terrorism and Disaster Preparedness Committee as well as the Allegheny County Medical Reserve Corps. He was formerly a member of the National Quality Forum Infectious Disease Standing Committee; he currently serves on their Primary Care and Chronic Illness Standing Committee, and the US Department of Health and Human Services National Disaster Medical System, with which he was deployed to Haiti after the 2010 earthquake and was also selected for their mobile acute care strike team. Dr. Adalja's expertise is frequently sought by international and national media.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Dr. Adalja has served as a member of the National Collegiate Athletic Association coronavirus advisory group; a consultant to various businesses, schools, and organizations; and an informal advisor to the International Monetary Fund. He has also testified before the US House Foreign Affairs Committee and the Pennsylvania House Health Committee.

Dr. Adalja is an Associate Editor of the journal Health Security. He was a coeditor of the volume Global Catastrophic Biological Risks and a contributing author for the Handbook of Bioterrorism and Disaster Medicine, the Emergency Medicine CorePendium, Clinical Microbiology Made Ridiculously Simple, UpToDate's section on biological terrorism, and a NATO volume on bioterrorism. He has also published in such journals as the New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA, Journal of Infectious Diseases, Clinical Infectious Diseases, Emerging Infectious Diseases, Annals of Emergency Medicine, and Health Security.