Gonzalo Bacigalupe, EdD, MPH, is professor of Counseling Psychology at the University of Massachusetts Boston. He is principal investigator of the Mediated Technologies for DRD at the National Research Center for Integrated Disaster Risk Management (CIGIDEN), and adjunct professor at the Catholic University of Chile School of Engineering. His research with colleagues in Chile, Mexico, Portugal, Spain, Turkey, and the USA, focuses on the impact of emerging media adoption on families, the role of patient online communities, the use of emerging media to build community resilience for disaster risk reduction, and family health. Bacigalupe has published and presented on research addressing the role of emerging digital technologies and vulnerable populations including transnational families and couples, political and family violence, family health and disparities (celiac disease, chronic pain, and medication strategies and literacy), e-health, and social technologies. He is presently studying the role of digital volunteers and the use of drones to strengthen disaster risk reduction among vulnerable communities in Chile.

Marco Lienhard studied the shakuhachi under Master Katsuya Yokoyama, quickly mastering the instrument and becoming a virtuoso solo artist. Marco Lienhard mastered Taiko drumming as a member of Ondekoza for 18 years. While touring as a professional taiko player in Japan, Lienhard also studied the fue and the nohkan (Noh theater flute) with Yukimasa Isso. In 1995, Lienhard founded Taikoza in New York, where he now makes his home. With Taikoza he has toured, the US, Japan, Mexico and Europe. Lienhard has performed more than 3000 concerts in Europe, Oceania, Asia and North and South America with appearances at some He toured Japan with Carnegie Kids program. He regularly teaches and performs in Japan, South America, US and Russia. His best selling albums include award nominated Taikoza Cd, best selling Music of Hayao Miyazaki 1 and 2 Cd.  He recently recorded two albums for Piano and Shakuhachi; the critically acclaimed: Travelers's Song as well as the Classical music collection: Rêverie.  He recorded music for  the new Nintendo wii game Red Steel 2. In 2015., he released two CDs of his music composed and arranged for Taikoza: Voice of the Earth and Tree Spirit.

Joëlle Champalet is a doctoral student at the Graduate School of Science and Technology Policy, in Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology. She is interested in the intertwined relationship between technology and territories, everyday practices and smart cities. During her master’s thesis and the pandemic, she focused on the transformation of everyday practices of inhabitants by smart systems in South Korea.

Hyunah Keum is a doctoral student at the Graduate School of Science and Technology Policy, in Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology. She is interested in the materiality, socioeconomic, and environmental impacts of various wastes. She wrote her master’s thesis about plastic wastes during COVID-19 in South Korea, to investigate different practices to regulate or promote the use of plastic from the perspective of slow disaster. She wants to expand her research fields into revealing unequal relationships around waste, and its impacts on different beings, not just humans but also non-humans. 

Seulgi Lee studied chemistry in her undergraduate and became a master's course student in STP KAIST starting from last year. She is interested in the dynamics between disaster and victims' identity, especially from a feminist perspective.

Hyeonbin Park is a doctoral student in the Graduate School of Science and Technology Policy at KAIST. He got his Master's degree in theoretical cosmology, but social and environmental disasters have attracted him, so he moved down to the Earth to pay more attention to human and nonhuman lives in the world. His research interests cover broadly Disaster studies, and Environmental humanities & social sciences. He would like investigate how disaster shapes the world and to develop a way of living together with various humans and nonhumans. 

Steve Knowles was born in Odessa, Texas, and is a fourth generation Texan with a deep appreciation for the unique heritage of growing up and living in West Texas. His experiences of a boyhood developed in a postwar America framed much of his positive outlook for his entire life.

Knowles earned a B.B.A. degree from the University of Texas at Austin, and a M.B.A. degree from the University of Texas of the Permian Basin. He is a 40-year veteran of human resources management, and retired from the Farm Credit Bank of Texas as their Vice President of Human Resources. He now resides in the Sun City community located in Georgetown, Texas.

Steve is married to Harriet, a retired Pediatric Physical Therapist and has five children and seven grandchildren. He is a member in the Presbyterian Church, and an avid Texas Longhorns’ fan.

David Brick David is Artistic Director and Co-Founder of Headlong Dance Theater, a platform for performance research and grassroots artist support, founded in Philadelphia in 1993. He also directs the Headlong Performance Institute, a supported residency and training program. David collaborates broadly in making dance, participatory installations and community. The experience of growing up as a hearing person in a Deaf family continually influences his thinking about performing bodies as being both subjects and agents of culture. His writings about art practice as a form of thinking and experience can be found on The Quiet Circus Blog.

Kim Fortun is a professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Irvine.  Her research and teaching focus how people in different geographic and organizational contexts understand environmental problems, uneven distributions of environmental health risks, developments in the environmental health sciences, and factors that contribute to disaster vulnerability.  Fortun is the author of Advocacy After Bhopal Environmentalism, Disaster (2001).

Jason Ludwig is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Science and Technology Studies. His research interests converge around race, disaster, and the possibility of a radical politics of science and technology.

Lori Peek is professor in the Department of Sociology and director of the Natural Hazards Center at the University of Colorado Boulder. She has written and edited several books on marginalized populations in disasters, and she leads the National Science Foundation-funded CONVERGE initiative.

Today I want to do a deep dive into COVID metaphors- COVID history, COVID research networks, and COVID emotions- a big topic with some amazing guests.

My guests today- make this episode particularly special, as they are both brilliant historians and also friends.

Dr. Agnes Arnold-Forster is a historian of medicine, healthcare, work, and emotions at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. Her first book, The Cancer Problem, was published by Oxford University Press in 2021, and is current sitting on my desk. Agnes is current a co-PI on the project Healthy Scepticism, a Wellcome Trust and King’s College funded multidisciplinary project about healthcare dissenters and anti-establishment voices. For several years before this she was part of the Surgery and Emotion project- a second monograph Cold, Hard Steel: The Surgical Stereotype Past & Present comes out this year with Manchester University Press.

Dr. Nathan Crowe is an Associate Professor of History at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington. He is an expert on the history of twentieth century biology, biotechnology, biomedicine and Anglo-American scientific culture. His book- also on my desk, Forgotten Clones: the Birth of Cloning and the Biological Revolution, charts the emergence of cloning techniques in cancer research after WWII, and the complicated matrix of cloning science and cloning publics into the 1960s. Nathan is currently working a several projects related to understanding biotechnology.

Eleanor Mayes is completing a Master of Design at the University of California, Berkeley. She is interested in accessibility, sustainability, and fostering equity within design and engineering. She manages the transcription of COVIDCalls, and assists with the roll-out of the COVIDCalls archive and website.

Shivani Patel is a 3rd year undergraduate student at Drexel University studying Finance and Economics with a minor in Philadelphia. For the past two years, she has been working at COVID-Calls as a production assistant helping with scheduling guests and keeping the calendar organized.

Bucky Stanton is a PhD Candidate in the department of Science & Technology Studies (STS) at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. His dissertation Arkadian Pasts and Futures investigates natural and cultural resource extraction in the central Peloponnese, exploring the history and politics of archaeology, energy and modernity in Greece

My guests today:

Nadja Durbach is Professor of History at the University of Utah. She received her PhD from the Johns Hopkins University and is the author of three books on the history of the body in Modern Britain: Bodily Matters: The Anti-Vaccination Movement in England, 1853-1907 (2005), Spectacle of Deformity: Freak Shows and Modern British Culture (2010) and Many Mouths: The Politics of Food in Britain from the Workhouse to the Welfare State (2020).

Claas Kirchhelle is Assistant Professor of History (Wellcome Trust University Award) at University College Dublin. His research focuses on the history of microbes, infectious disease control, and the development and regulation of antibiotics and vaccines. He has authored three books on the history of antibiotics in food production (Pyrrhic Progress, 2020 (Rutgers)), animal welfare science and activism (Bearing Witness, 2021 (Palgrave)), and typhoid control (Typhoid, 2022 (Scala)). He is also co-curator of two multi award-winning exhibitions on the history of penicillin (Back from the Dead) and typhoid (Typhoidland).

Daniel Goldberg, is an Associate Professor at the Center for Bioethics and Humanities at the University of Colorado’s Anschutz Medical Campus. Trained as an attorney, a historian of medicine, and an ethicist, his work is wide-ranging on issues of public health law and ethics, population-level bioethics, the social determinants of health, chronic disease, and pain. Dr. Goldberg has published in virtually every important venue, including the American Journal of Bioethics and the New England Journal of Medicine, and he’s been extraordinarily active the past two years in op-eds and interviews about the ongoing pandemic.

This is Part 2 of a two-part episode exploring the entanglement of the COVID-19 pandemic and the War in Ukraine. Last hour I spoke with Ukrainian health expert Pavlo Kovtoniuk and historian Dora Vargha. On February 24th, 2022, Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba tweeted that Putin had “launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine.” Russian attacks began that Thursday after Russian President Vladimir Putin approved in a televised address “a special military operation” in Ukraine. Russian missiles began to attack cities and civilians all across Ukraine. Three weeks later the war in Ukraine rages on. 2 to 3 million Ukrainians have fled the country, and millions more displaced internally within the country, creating a tremendous humanitarian crisis, and what is undoubtedly the largest European military conflict since WWII. Casualty statistics have been difficult to come by- the UN reported yesterday more than 500 civilian Ukrainian deaths, and US military estimates are between 2,000 and 4,000 deaths in the Ukrainian armed forces, and 5,000 to 6,000 deaths of Russian soldiers.

Dr. Trish Starks is a historian of Russian and former Soviet medicine and public health, and a professor of history at the University of Arkansas. She has written extensively on Soviet hygienic reforms in the 1920s in her 2008 book The Body Soviet: Hygiene Propaganda, and the Revolutionary State,  smoking in the Soviet Union in the 2018 book Smoking Under the Tsars, and her newly published book Cigarettes and Soviets: Tobacco in the USSR. She is currently working on gendered anxieties of the body and vigor in Russian contexts.

My second guest, Dr. Paula Michaels, is an Associate Professor of History at Monash University. She is an expert on the history of medicine and gender Russia, Eastern Europe, and Eurasia. Dr. Michaels is a leading expert in the field of trauma studies, publishing numerous articles about childbirth, and maternity care and trauma in Eastern European history. Her 2014 book, Lamaze: An International History, was the winner of the 2015 Frances Richardson Keller-Sierra Prize from the Western Association of Women Historians. In 2021 she published Gender and Trauma Since 1900 with Christina Twomey, and is currently working on a  book project, Soviet Medical Internationalism and the Global Cold War

My guests today are experts here to help us make sense of the War and the Pandemic

Pavlo Kovtoniuk (Kov-to-Nyuk) is a co-founder of the Ukrainian Healthcare Center - UHC, a think tank located in Kyiv, Ukraine. His background is in health financing and management. In 2016-2019 he served as a vice-minister of health of Ukraine and led a large-scale health system reform in the country. In 2019-2020 he was a consultant at the WHO office for health systems strengthening in Barcelona. During the COVID-19 Pavlo’s team at the UHC monitored the pandemic in Ukraine and supported the government in pandemic response. 

Dora Vargha is Professor of History and Medical Humanities based jointly at Humboldt University in Berlin and the University of Exeter. She is currently leading two research projects on the history of socialism and global health. Previously, she had been co-editor of the journal Social History of Medicine and has worked as an expert for WHO Western Pacific on informing epidemic preparedness with historical perspectives. 

Gregg Gonsalves is an expert in policy modeling on infectious disease and substance use, as well as the intersection of public policy and health equity. For more than 30 years, he worked on HIV/AIDS and other global health issues with several organizations, including the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, the Treatment Action Group, Gay Men’s Health Crisis, and the AIDS and Rights Alliance for Southern Africa. He is a 2018 MacArthur Fellow.

Cassie Alexander is a registered nurse of fourteen years and author. As Cassandra, she's written the Year of the Nurse: A 2020 Covid-19 Pandemic Memoir. As Cassie, she's written numerous paranormal romances, with vampires, werewolves, and dragon-shifters.

Aqsa Shaikh (She /Her) is Associate Professor of Community Medicine at Jamia Hamdard University, Delhi. She is India's First Trans Woman Nodal Officer of Covid Vaccination centre.

Sonali Vaid is a physician and public health specialist. She is the founder of Incluve Labs, an organisation working to improve the quality of healthcare and making care more humane. 

My guest is Christina Simko. Christina Simko is associate professor of sociology at Williams College. Her research focuses on violent pasts and the complexities that they create for identity and narrative. Her first book, The Politics of Consolation: Memory and the Meaning of September 11 (Oxford University Press) received an honorable mention for the Mary Douglas Prize from the American Sociological Association. In addition to her research on 9/11 memory, Simko’s published work has examined the legacies of the 1945 atomic bombings, the Equal Justice Initiative’s National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Alabama, and ongoing debates about the future of Confederate monuments. Her current book project, tentatively titled Suffering from Reminiscences, examines several memorials and museums to terrorism and their companion museums as windows onto contemporary trauma culture in the United States.

Shannon Mattern is Professor at The New School for Social Research. Her writing and teaching focus on media architectures and infrastructures and spatial epistemologies. She has written books about libraries, maps, and the history of urban intelligence, and she contributes a column about urban data and mediated spaces to Places Journal. You can find her at wordsinspace.net. 

Heather Schulte is an interdisciplinary artist in Boulder, CO. Her work combines analog textile materials and techniques with digital material and design processes, analyzing the intersection of personal and public forms of language and communication. She received her BFA from the University of NE-Lincoln in 2003.

Jacqueline Wernimont is Distinguished Chair of Digital Humanities and Social Engagement & Associate Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Dartmouth College

She is an anti-racist, feminist scholar working toward greater justice in digital cultures and a network weaver across humanities, arts, and sciences.

Kristin Urquiza, is the Co-founder, and Chief Activist of Marked by COVID. Kristin is a graduate of Yale University and UC Berkeley’s Goldman School of Public Policy where she has a Master of Public Affairs.

Joy Banner, Ph.D. is the Director of Media and Marketing at Whitney Plantation. She is a native, and resident of Wallace, LA and a descendant of Whitney Plantation. Inspired both by Whitney Plantation’s mission and her desire to help her largely descendant community, Joy returned home to advocate for economic and environmental rights. Joy has recently started the first chapter of “Coming To The Table”, an organization aimed at addressing the legacies of slavery by bringing together descendants of the enslaved and their enslavers. 

Felicia Henry is a licensed social worker and a Ph.D. student in the Department of Sociology and Criminal Justice at the University of Delaware, where she is also a Bill Anderson Fund Fellow. 

Monica Sanders is the managing director of the Georgetown University Environmental Justice Program. She is the founder of "The Undivide Project", an organization dedicated to addressing the legal and policy changes needed to address the intersections between digital and climate equity. She also teaches Law, Policy and Practice in Disasters and Complex Emergencies at the Georgetown Law Center. 

From New Jersey, John Gorka is a world-renowned singer-songwriter who got his start at a neighborhood coffeehouse in eastern Pennsylvania.  Jack Hardy’s legendary Fast Folk circle (a breeding ground for many a major singer-songwriter) was a powerful source of education and encouragement early in his career, and he won the New Folk Award in 1984 at Texas’ Kerrville Folk Festival. In addition to his 11 critically acclaimed albums, John released a collector’s edition box featuring a hi-definition DVD and companion CD called The Gypsy Life. Windham Hill also released a collection of John’s greatest hits from the label called Pure John Gorka. In 2010, he also released an album with his friends and Red House label-mates Lucy Kaplansky and Eliza Gilkyson under the name Red Horse. Getting high praise from critics and fans alike, it landed on the Billboard Folk Charts and was one of the most played albums on folk radio. Many well known artists have recorded and/or performed John Gorka songs, including Mary Chapin Carpenter, Nanci Griffith, Mary Black and Maura O’Connell. John has played all over the USA and Europe at hallowed venues like Austin City Limits and Mountain Stage.

Monica H. Green is a historian of medicine, currently serving as SOO-PEES Suppes Visiting Professor of the History of Science at Stanford University. She specializes in the premodern period and global infectious diseases. She is writing a book on the Black Death that draws on evidence from genetics, archaeology, and historical sources to document the early origin and broad geographic extent of the 2nd Plague Pandemic.

Christos Lynteris is Professor of Medical Anthropology at the University of St Andrews. His research focuses on the anthropological and historical examination of epidemics, zoonosis, epidemiological epistemology, medical visual culture, colonial medicine, and pandemics as events posing an existential risk to humanity.

Jacob Steere-Williams is a historian of epidemic disease at the Colle of Charleston specializing in nineteenth and early-twentieth century Britain and the former British colonies. He is a frequent guest host and contributor to COVIDCalls.

Alain J.-J. Cohen is Professor of Comparative Literature and Film Studies at the University of California, San Diego where he has spent his career. He is also a practicing psychoanalyst, member of the San Diego Psychoanalytic Center, the American Psychoanalytic Association and the International Psychoanalytic Association. He has single-authored about 100 articles about auteur-filmmakers, text semiotics, or art history, in various journals and book chapters, and presented about 300 papers, nationally and internationally. In his research, teaching and talks, his analysis focuses at the granular interweave of technical prowess and psychological motivation.

Asif Siddiqi is a professor of history at Fordham University in New York. He writes and teaches on both the history of technology and modern Russian history, as well as the intersection of the two. He has written many books and articles on the history of space exploration, including the Red Rockets’ Glare: Spaceflight and the Soviet Imagination, 1857-1957 (Cambridge University Press, 2010). More recently, his work has focused on global histories of infrastructure and technology focusing particularly on Africa and South Asia. He is currently working on a book under contract with MIT Press provisionally titled Departure Gates: Postcolonial Histories of Space on Earth. This year he is on leave at Princeton University’s Davis Center for Historical Studies.

Harriet Knowles is a native Texan, having been born and raised out in West Texas in the town of Midland. She had an unique experience in her high school education in that her father was her school principal. Harriet attended Southwestern University in Georgetown, Texas and continued her education at the University of Texas Health Science Center in Dallas to obtain her Physical Therapy degree. She also earned a Master’s in Behavior Science from University of Texas Permian when she worked as a pediatric physical therapist  back in Midland.

Harriet was in the workforce in Physical Therapy pediatric-related jobs and worked for the Austin Independent School District as a Physical Therapist for her last 19 years before retirement.

Harriet lives in Georgetown in the Sun City community with Steve and enjoys her  time by loving on her grandchildren (7 so far!), traveling, and reading.  She is also taking care of her mother who lives with them there.

Susan Meurling is a retired technology educator. She graduated from Tufts University (English major), grad Manhattanville (Ed psych) and Teachers College Columbia (communications, computing, and technology). Taught in Ovid, NY, Scarsdale NY, and Houston (Spring Branch) TX. After tech moved into education, she taught the basics of computer literacy and emerging technologies to kids in elementary and middle school. Supported teachers and administrators in integrating tech into their lives and careers. After retirement, babysat for first grandchild, then helped a Section 8 housing unit set up and use their computer room. Also volunteered at a senior day center in Boston before the pandemic. Since 2013, volunteered on the board and executive committee of a Cambridge non-profit choral organization. Proud parent of two successful professional women, and grateful grandparent of four amazing grandchildren ages 8 to 13.

Julia Irwin is Associate Professor and Associate Chair in the department of history at the University of South Florida.  Her research focuses on the place of humanitarianism and foreign assistance in 20th century U.S. foreign relations and international history. Her first book, Making the World Safe: The American Red Cross and a Nation’s Humanitarian Awakening, was published in 2013 by Oxford University Press. A history of U.S. relief efforts for foreign civilians in the era of the First World War, her book analyzes both the diplomatic and the cultural significance of humanitarian aid in these years.  Currently, she is writing Catastrophic Diplomacy: A History of U.S. Responses to Global Natural Disaster.

Daniel A. Barber is Associate Professor of Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania Weitzman School of Design, where he is also Chair of the interdisciplinary PhD Program in Architecture. His most recent book is Modern Architecture and Climate: Design before Air Conditioning (Princeton UP, 2020). Daniel edits the accumulation series on e-flux architecture and is co-founder of the Current: Collective on Environment and Architectural History. For 2021-2022 he is a Senior Fellow at the Käte Hamburger Centre for Apocalyptic and Post-Apocalyptic Studies at Universität Heidelberg.

Jeannette Kuo is partner at Karamuk Kuo Architects based in Zurich and Professor of Architecture and Construction at TU Munich. Previously she was Assistant Professor in Practice at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design and Visiting Professor at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne. Her work and her research focus on integrated design, looking at architectural space, technology and culture to address a more sustainable future. The work of the office ranges from collective housing to institutional projects for public clients and include the International Sports Sciences Institute in Lausanne, a low-tech sustainable office building; the Archaeological Center at Augusta Raurica; and the extension to the Rice University School of Architecture in Houston.

Paul Lewis, FAIA, is a Principal at LTL Architects based in New York City.  He is a Professor at Princeton University School of Architecture, where he has taught since 2000.  Paul is the President of the Architectural League of New York and a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome.  His New York based firm has completed academic, cultural and institutional projects throughout the United States.  LTL are the 2019 NY State AIA firm of the year and have received a National Design Award, have been inducted into the ID Hall of Fame, and have received multiple AIA design awards.  The firm’s recent work includes Poster House, The Helen R. Walton Children’s Enrichment Center, and a new residence hall at Carnegie Mellon University.  LTL Architects are the authors of Manual of PhysicalDistancing (2020), Intensities (2013), Opportunistic Architecture (2008) and Situation Normal....Pamphlet Architecture #21 (1998). Their 2016 book entitled Manual of Section has been translated into six languages, and LTL is currently completing a book about plant-based materials used in the sections of house construction.

Lagipoiva Cherelle Jackson is a leading climate change journalist and scholar with a focus on small islands, gender, environmental negotiations and human rights. Lagipoiva Cherelle brings deep experience in Pacific Islands journalism and media startups as the founder and editor of the Pacific Environment Weekly, the first environment news website and syndicate in the Pacific Islands. She also has extensive experience reporting for international newsmedia as a writer for Guardian Australia and a contributor to Al Jazeera, the New Zealand Herald and Agence France Presse.

Kate Starbird is an Associate Professor at the Department of Human Centered Design & Engineering (HCDE) at the University of Washington (UW). Kate’s research is situated within human-computer interaction and the emerging field of crisis informatics—the study of the how social media and other information-communication technologies are used during crisis events. Currently, her work focuses on the production and spread of online rumors, misinformation, and disinformation in the context of crisis events. Starbird is a co-founder of the UW Center for an Informed Public.

Mark Healey is an urban, environmental, and political historian of Latin America, and also a fellow disaster scholar. The author of “The Ruins of the New Argentina” (Duke, 2011), he is currently writing a book about the environmental and political history of water in the drylands of Argentina, as well as a project about the transnational political history of housing and development. He has taught at NYU, the University of Mississippi, UC Berkeley and, since 2011, the University of Connecticut, where he is now Head of Department.

Christos Lynteris is a medical anthropologist, and senior lecture at the Univ. of St. Andrews in the UK. His research focuses on the anthropological and historical examination of epidemics, zoonosis, epidemiological epistemology, medical visual culture, colonial medicine, and epidemics as events posing an existential risk to humanity.

Dr Lynteris' new project (2019-2024) The Global War Against the Rat and the Epistemic Emergence of Zoonosis will examine the global history of a foundational but historically neglected process in the development of scientific approaches of zoonosis: the global war against the rat (1898-1948).

Dr Lynteris' recently completed project Visual Representations of the Third Plague Pandemic (2013-2018) collected and analysed photographs and other visual documents of the third plague pandemic (1855-1959).

For updates on Christos Lynteris' Global War Against the Rat and the Epistemic Emergence of Zoonosis and Visual Representations of the Third Plague Pandemic projects: @visualplague

Deborah Amos is an award-winning international correspondent for NPR News, which regularly features her groundbreaking reporting on the Middle East and refugees in the United States on Morning Edition, Weekend Edition, and All Things Considered. Amos previously reported for ABC’s Nightline and PBS’s Frontline. A member of the Council on Foreign Relations, she is the author of two books, Eclipse of the Sunnis: Power, Exile, and Upheaval in the Middle East (Public Affairs, 2010) and Lines in the Sand: Desert Storm and the Remaking of the Arab World (Simon and Schuster, 1992). Amos has won several major journalism honors, including the Courage in Journalism Award from the International Women’s Media Foundation, George Foster Peabody Award, Edward R. Murrow Lifetime Achievement Award, and an Emmy. She was part of a team of reporters who won a 2004 Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Award for coverage of Iraq. She is presently a fellow of the American Academy in Berlin.

John Vsetecka is a PhD Candidate in the Department of History at Michigan State University where he is writing a dissertation on the 1932-1933 famine (Holodomor) and the 1946-1947 famine in Soviet Ukraine. He is the founder and one of the current editors of H-Ukraine--part of the larger H-Net online platform--that is dedicated to promoting and sharing academic and scholarly content related to the study of Ukraine. During the 2021-2022 academic year, John was on a Fulbright scholarship to Kyiv, Ukraine but was evacuated out of the country in late January due to the threat of war. John is currently in Warsaw, Poland finishing his grant and working with refugees who are crossing into Poland from Ukraine.

Laura Helmuth is the Editor in Chief of Scientific American. She has previously been an editor for The Washington Post, National Geographic, Slate, Smithsonian, and Science’s news section. She serves on the boards of High Country News, Spectrum and SciLine and is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine’s standing committee on the science of science communication. She is a past president of the National Association of Science Writers.

Michael Yudell is vice dean and professor in the ASU college if health solutions.  He is a public health ethicist and award-winning historian whose work focuses on the history and ethics of genomics, the history of the race concept, and the history and ethics of autism research

Yudell is the author of Race Unmasked: Biology and Race in the 20th Century (Columbia University Press, 2014), winner of the 2016 Arthur J. Viseltear Award from the American Public Health Association. On a lighter note, Yudell performs in the long-running improv comedy show Study Hall.

David Adam is a best-selling author and an award-winning journalist, who covers science, environment, technology, medicine and the impact they have on people, culture and society.

Originally from Arlington, Texas, Krista Rowe is an independent filmmaker, producer, director, and actress. She produced three seasons of the reality road trip cooking show American Food Battle with Helsinki based Mogul Media, for the AWE network and National Geographic Channel. She also produced Amanda and The Players, a hockey reality series for Mogul Media. She works as a commercial, television and film actress in Canada. Her first documentary film, Promise House - Heather’s Story was selected for an award of merit at the Impact Doc Awards and she was named Best Canadian Female Filmmaker at the Toronto International Women's Film Festival.

She holds a BA in Theatre Arts from Texas Christian University and a Master’s Degree in International Education from New York University. She is the founder of 3LG Productions. Krista lives in Toronto with her husband, three daughters, and Peggy the schnoodle dog. 

James McWilliams, is currently writing a biography of the southern poet Frank Stanford. He's written about a wide range of interests, including the American South, food and agriculture, animal ethics, memory, and the poetics of place. His work has appeared in literary venues ranging from Runner's World to The Paris Review, including The Virginia Quarterly Review, The New Yorker, and Harper's. He lives in Austin, Texas but spends as much time as he can in New Orleans. He has taught history at Texas State University since the last century. His face has appeared in People Magazine. 

Roberto Moris is an architect who graduated from the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile, with a Master in City Design and Social Sciences, London School of Economics, and Ph.D. student in Civil Engineering, University of Granada. He is an expert on integrated planning, carrying capacity models, sustainability, and resilience. He has worked with the UNDP, World Bank, and IADB. He is a professor at the School of Architecture and the Institute of Urban and Territorial Studies. He was Principal Investigator of the National Research Center for Integrated Risk Management, Director of Cities Observatory UC, and Director of Plans and Urban Projects Program UC. His research has focused on developing instruments to assist decision-making through methodologies and management models that integrate people into common objectives.

Dr. Marla Petal is Save the Children’s Principal Advisor for School Safety and Resilience. Her educational background is in social work and urban planning, and her research background is in education policy, full inclusion, public education for risk reduction and resilience, and earthquake epidemiology. She has 20 years of experience in advocacy and programming community and school risk reduction and resilience.

During CoVID she channeled her mentor Kevin Ronan to launch the Converge Working Group on the Impacts of Covid on Children, Youth and Schools, and co-developed a priority research agenda to last for a decade.  Professionals and grad student then volunteered to review the research so-far on pandemic impacts on children & youth well-being.

Stephen Collier is Professor of City and Regional Planning at the University of California, Berkeley. He is author of Post-Soviet Social: Neoliberalism, Social Modernity, Biopolitics (2011), and, with Andrew Lakoff, The Government of Emergency: Vital Systems, Expertise, and the Politics of Security (2021). 

Andrew Lakoff is Professor of Sociology at the University of Southern California, where he also directs the Center on Science, Technology, and Public Life. He is the author of Pharmaceutical Reason: Knowledge and Value in Global Psychiatry (Cambridge, 2006), Unprepared: Global Health in a Time of Emergency (California, 2017), and, with Stephen Collier, The Government of Emergency: Vital Systems, Expertise, and the Politics of Security (Princeton, 2021). 

Virginia Heffernan is an accomplished journalist and cultural critic—she is a regular contributor to The New York Times, as well as The Wall Street Journal, Mother Jones, and Politico.  She writes a regular column for Wired Magazine and the LA Times—and she is co-host of the Trumpcast on Slate.  She is also the author of Magic and Loss: The Internet as Art (2016) with Simon and Schuster. She hosts the This is Critical podcast.

Dr. Carla Keirns is assistant professor of Medical Ethics and Internal Medicine at the University of Kansas in Kansas City, Kansas. She has published in the history, sociology and ethics of medicine, and has been treating patients the past year through the COVID-19 pandemic, both those with COVID and whose care looks very different because of it.

Dr. Emily Hansen is an Assistant Professor of Medicine at the University of Kansas Medical Center in the Palliative Medicine Division. She received her medical degree from the Kansas City University of Medicine and Biosciences. Further training included completing her Family Medicine residency at Research Medical Center and Palliative Medicine fellowship at the University of Kansas Medical Center. Her interests include LGBTQ+ disparities in healthcare, art therapy, educational development, and teaching in the setting of palliative medicine.

Guian McKee serves as associate professor of presidential studies at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center of Public Affairs, where he is also co-director of the center’s new Health Care Policy Initiative. He is the author of Hospital City, Health Care Nation: Race, Capital, and the Costs of American Health Care, which will be published in February 2023 by the University of Pennsylvania Press. He is also the author of The Problem of Jobs: Liberalism, Race, and Deindustrialization in Philadelphia (2008, Chicago), and the editor or co-editor of five volumes in the Miller Center’s “Presidential Recordings of Lyndon Johnson” series.

My guest once sky wrote “How Do I Land” in the sky over LA. A Comedian, writer and actor he has appeared in the Oscar nominated The Big Sick, the Charlize Theron and Seth Rogen Rom Com Longshot as well as Fox’s Bobs Burgers and NBC’s The Good Place. His strange news podcast BANANAS is available wherever you listen to podcasts.

My guest today is Professor Kathy Bergin.  Kathy is a recognized expert in Disaster Law, she presently teaches at Cornell University Law School—her research extends to humanitarian aid programs and the catastrophic impact of climate change. She has been crucial in promoting Disaster Law as an academic discipline. She is also a successful advocate. Her team in Haiti established binding precedent in a proceeding before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights that reinforced post-disaster human rights obligations. Her work on mass evacuation shelters after Hurricane Katrina is used across the humanitarian sector as a blue-print for protecting displaced survivors. She is on the steering committee for Project Blueprint, a policy advocacy organization aimed at promoting a progressive US foreign policy. 

Russ Pharr is a graduate of Austin College in Sherman, Texas. He is Father of 2 fantastic teenagers and currently works with Rivian Automotive, the electric vehicle maker that brought the first All Electric Pick up truck to market. He is a native Texan and grew up in Arlington Texas. He currently lives in Dallas Texas

Wesley Cheek is a sociologist of disasters and a geographer focusing on critical urban theory and community involvement in post-disaster reconstruction at Edge Hill University UK.  For the past decade he has undertaken extensive ethnographic fieldwork in the town of Minamisanriku, a small fishing village in Miyagi Prefecture still recovering from the 2011 earthquake and tsunami. His research sits at the confluence of architectural history, cultural heritage, and disasters. His research has largely focused on Northeastern Japan, Southeastern Louisiana, and the American Gulf South.

Dr Ksenia Chmutina is a Reader in Sustainable and Resilient Urbanism at Loughborough University,UK. Ksenia's research focuses on the processes of urban disaster risk creation and systemic implications of sustainability and resilience in the context of neoliberalism. Ksenia uses her work to draw attention to the fact that disasters are not natural. She is a co-host of a podcast ‘Disasters: Deconstructed’.

Samantha Montano is an assistant professor of emergency management at Massachusetts Maritime Academy. Her first book is: DISASTEROLOGY: Dispatches from The Front Lines of The Climate Crisis comes out this August. She is also author of recent essay: Not All Disasters Are Disasters: Pandemic Categorization and Its Consequences with Amanda Savitt on SSRC Disaster Studies; and co-founder of Disaster Researchers for Justice.

Kim Bissell (Ph.D., Syracuse University) is the Southern Progress Endowed Professor in Magazine Journalism and Associate Dean for Research in the College of Communication and Information Sciences at the University of Alabama. She is also the Director of the college’s research institute, the Institute for Communication and Information Research. She has done research in health and sports communication for more than 20 years and has received external funding for her work in health disparities and children.   Much of her research examines the social effects of media specific to health outcomes in children.  

Jiyoung Lee (Ph.D., Syracuse University) is an Assistant Professor at the University of Alabama, Department of Journalism and Creative Media. Her research is at the heart of emerging media effects including artificial intelligence and augmented reality on persuasion communication. Specifically, she studies human-computer interaction in the context of medical/risk misinformation, how new media affect polarization, and how media literacy interventions should be designed to engage the public in accurate information about health risks. Her work has appeared in several top communication journals, including Media Psychology, Health Communication, Behaviour & Information Technology, and Journal of Applied Communication Research. 

Kathleen Tierney is professor emerita in the Department of Sociology and research professor in the Institute of Behavioral Science at the University of Colorado Boulder. From 2003 to 2017, she was director of the university’s Natural Hazards Center. 

She was lead author (with co-authors Michael Lindell and Ronald Perry) of Facing the Unexpected: Disaster Preparedness and Response in the United States (Joseph Henry Press 2001), co-editor (with William Waugh) of Emergency Management: Principles and Practice for Local Governments (ICMA Press, 2007), and author of The Social Roots of Risk (Stanford University Press 2014). Her most recent book, Disasters: Sociological Aspects was published in 2019 by Polity Press.

She has received recognition for her contributions to the study of hazards and disasters, including the Fred Buttel Award for Distinguished Contributions from the Environment and Society section of the American Sociological Association and the Charles Fritz Award from the International Sociological Association’s International Research Committee on Disasters. She has served as a board member and vice president of the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute and has been named an honorary lifetime EERI member—one of only two sociologists to receive that honor.

Jonathon Catlin is a PhD Candidate in the Department of History and the Interdisciplinary Doctoral Program in the Humanities at Princeton University. His dissertation is a history of the concept of catastrophe in twentieth-century European thought, spanning from the rise of fascism to climate change, with a focus on the writings of the Frankfurt School of critical theory and intellectual responses to the Holocaust. He has applied his critical work on the concept of catastrophe in public writings on the pandemic through a series of collaborations with Benjamin Davis published in Public Seminar, as well as an article in Memory Studies that interrogates the "multidirectional" memory politics of the Covid-AIDS analogy in an American context.

Benjamin P. Davis is a Postdoctoral Fellow in Ethics at the University of Toronto’s Centre for Ethics. His current research brings together human rights and decolonial thinking. It includes the articles "What Could Human Rights Do? A Decolonial Inquiry" (Transmodernity, 2020), “The Promises of Standing Rock” (Humanity, 2021), and "Human Rights and Caribbean Philosophy: Implications for Teaching" (Journal of Human Rights Practice, 2021). Outside of his work on human rights, his research considers the concepts of Édouard Glissant and Simone Weil with a view toward political belonging in the present.

Dr. Ryan Hagen is a Lecturer in the department of Sociology at Columbia University. He studies risk and the social construction of knowledge, focusing on how people and institutions anticipate future dangers. He is a co-director of the New York City COVID-19 Oral History, Memory, and Narrative Archive project at Columbia University, which since April of 2020 has conducted hundreds of interviews with New Yorkers, tracing their evolving experiences of the pandemic.

Robert Jacobs is a Professor of History at the Hiroshima Peace Institute and the Graduate School of Peace Studies of Hiroshima City University. Jacobs is the author of The Dragon's Tail: Americans Face the Atomic Age (2010), (also available in a Japanese translation published by Gaifusha in 2013), and the editor of Filling the Hole in the Nuclear Future: Art and Popular Culture Respond to the Bomb (2010), and numerous other books and journal articles on nuclear history. Beginning in 2010, Jacobs co-founded the Global Hibakusha Project. The project conducts field research at radiation affected sites and in radiation affected communities around the world. His book based on this research, Nuclear Bodies: The Global Hibakusha will be published by Yale University Press in 2022.

Charlie McCone is a 32 year old long COVID patient and advocate based in San Francisco, CA who was struck with a 'mild case' of the virus in March 2020, and has suffered severe debilitating symptoms ongoing two years now. Prior to illness he was in the prime of his life with no health issues to speak of. He was an active tennis player, cyclist and musician, who biked 10 miles a day and ran 10 miles a week, and worked full-time as a non-profit professional. He is currently on short-term disability, is severely house-bound and relies on his long-term partner as a full-time care-taker. Like many Long Covid patients, he has seen over 50 doctors and health care providers since his illness, and many of Long Covid symptoms remain unexplained and untreated.

Thurka Sangaramoorthy is a cultural and medical anthropologist and public health researcher with 22 years of experience conducting community-engaged ethnographic research, including rapid assessments, among vulnerable populations in the United States, Africa, and Latin America/Caribbean. Her work is broadly concerned with power and subjectivity in global economies of care. She has worked at this intersection on diverse topics, including global health and migration, HIV/STD, and environmental health disparities. She is the author of two books: Rapid Ethnographic Assessments: A Practical Approach and Toolkit for Collaborative Community Research (Routledge, 2020) and Treating AIDS: Politics of Difference, Paradox of Prevention (Rutgers, 2014), and has two books in press: She’s Positive: The Extraordinary Lives of Black Women Living with HIV (Aevo, 2022) and Immigration and the Landscape of Care in Rural America (University of North Carolina Press, 2023). Dr. Sangaramoorthy is Co-Chair of the American Anthropological Association’s Members Programmatic Advisory and Advocacy Committee and a Board member of the Society for Medical Anthropology; she serves as Associate Editor of Public Health Reports, Editorial Board Member of American Anthropologist, and the inaugural Social, Behavioral, and Qualitative Research Section Editor for PLOS Global Public Health. She is currently Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Maryland. 

Keith “Maggie” Brown is a Denton-based poet-philosopher, spiritual counselor, and mind-walker. Besides their academic co-publications and intermittent podcasting, Maggie creates aphorisms to encourage their friends on the way to self-actualization. They have directed a few conferences at the University of North Texas in Denton since 1998: the North Texas Heidegger Symposium; Process Studies in Pedagogy; and the UNT Comics, Graphic Novel, and Serial Arts Studies Workshop. Besides being a lifetime member of the Karl Jaspers Society of North America, they also are a member in good standing with other philosophy groups like the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy as well as the Society for Phenomenology and the Human Sciences. 

Along with mentoring youth who want to practice philosophizing as a way of life, Maggie works to make ancient texts more accessible for 21st-century readers. Among his collaborations are a translation of the Dao De Jing with Prof. LU Wenlong of Dalian University and Greek Natural Philosophy: The Presocratics and Their Importance for Environmental Philosophy with Profs. J. Baird Callicott and John van Buren.  

After completing their M.A. in Philosphy (2016), they now are close to completing their dissertation for the Ph.D. at UNT-Denton: “Untying the [K]nots that Bind: Existential Elucidation and the Transgressive Life.” Maggie’s work focuses on queering academic research and weirding professional philosophy. 

Rashawn Ray is a David M. Rubenstein Fellow at The Brookings Institution. He is also an Associate Professor of Sociology and Executive Director of the Lab for Applied Social Science Research (LASSR) at the University of Maryland, College Park. Recently, Ray published the book How Families Matter: Simply Complicated Intersections of Race, Gender, and Work (with Pamela Braboy Jackson) and another edition of Race and Ethnic Relations in the 21st Century: History, Theory, Institutions, and Policy.

Dr. Freya Jephcott is a Senior Research Associate at the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at the University of Cambridge. She is a trained both as a medical anthropologist and an epidemiologist. Dr. Jephcott’s research focuses on the effectiveness of outbreak response systems in resource-limited settings, the management of outbreaks of uncertain etiology, and in particular zoonoses. Freya has also participated in applied policy work on health emergencies for Medicine Sans Frontieres and the World Health Organization.

David Steadson is a Consultant Public Health Epidemiologist and Entreprenuer who, after spending a decade in Public Health research and being trained as an epidemiologist, moved into the field of IT and Digital Health startups. His work in epidemiology has focused on mitigation strategies of drunk driving, and recently, he has written extensively about COVID-19, particularly in Scandinavian countries. He is the founder of VanaTech, a digital health company that helps to promote behavioral change in health using the latest research in epidemiology, psychology, and health economics. 

Sulfikar Amir is an associate professor of science, technology, and society (STS) and a faculty member in Sociology Program at the School of Social Sciences, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. He has conducted research on technological nationalism, development and globalization, nuclear politics, risk and disaster, design studies, cities and infrastructures, and resilience. He is the author of The Technological State in Indonesia: the Co-constitution of High Technology and Authoritarian Politics (Routledge, 2012), and the editor of The Sociotechnical Constitution of Resilience: A New Perspective on Governing Risk and Disaster (Palgrave, 2018). Aside from being a scholar, Amir is a documentary filmmaker. His latest film is Healing Fukushima, which chronicles the role and experiences of medical experts in Fukushima in dealing with radiation hazard in the aftermath of the nuclear disaster.

Keith “Maggie” Brown is a Denton-based poet-philosopher, spiritual counselor, and mind-walker. Besides their academic co-publications and intermittent podcasting, Maggie creates aphorisms to encourage their friends on the way to self-actualization. They have directed a few conferences at the University of North Texas in Denton since 1998: the North Texas Heidegger Symposium; Process Studies in Pedagogy; and the UNT Comics, Graphic Novel, and Serial Arts Studies Workshop. Besides being a lifetime member of the Karl Jaspers Society of North America, they also are a member in good standing with other philosophy groups like the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy as well as the Society for Phenomenology and the Human Sciences. 

Along with mentoring youth who want to practice philosophizing as a way of life, Maggie works to make ancient texts more accessible for 21st-century readers. Among his collaborations are a translation of the Dao De Jing with Prof. LU Wenlong of Dalian University and Greek Natural Philosophy: The Presocratics and Their Importance for Environmental Philosophy with Profs. J. Baird Callicott and John van Buren.  

After completing their M.A. in Philosphy (2016), they now are close to completing their dissertation for the Ph.D. at UNT-Denton: “Untying the [K]nots that Bind: Existential Elucidation and the Transgressive Life.” Maggie’s work focuses on queering academic research and weirding professional philosophy. 

Dr. Kathleen Bachynski is an assistant professor of public health at Muhlenberg College. Dr. Bachynski’s work on public health is wide-ranging, but she is a leading expert on brain injuries, sports, injury prevention, youth health, and risk. Her book, No Game for Boys to Play: The History of Youth Football and the Origins of a Public Health Crisis has been called by one scholar called “smart, salient, timely, eminently readable, and socially important.” It’s a terrific book and I highly suggest everyone order a copy.

Dr. Johanna Mellis is an assistant professor of World History at Ursinus (Er-sigh-nus) College outside of Philadelphia and was a former D-I swimmer at the College of Charleston and a former swim coach. She is a historian of Cold War sport who analyzes sporting interactions between Hungary, the International Olympic Committee, and the US. She is a co-host of the End of Sport podcast that explores capitalist sport, labor, and justice for the end of times and has written pieces for the Guardian, Time, Washington Post, and LA Times, and also for the Journal of Sport History and Contemporary European History. I am so excited to read the book she is working on, Changing the Global Game: Hungarian Athletes and International Sport during the Cold War.

Amy E. Slaton is a professor of history at Drexel University in Philadelphia.  She holds a PhD  in the History and Sociology of Science from the University of Pennsylvania. Her research focuses on the history of technical expertise and labor, seen through the lens of historical ideas of human difference—asking, that is, how ideas of race, gender, disability and queer identifications have operated in places of scientific and technical work. Her most recent book, Race, Rigor and Selectivity in U.S. Engineering: The History of an Occupational Color Line (Harvard University Press, 2010), follows racial ideologies in engineering higher education since the 1940s.  Her current book project, All Good People: Diversity, Difference and the Invention of Opportunity describes the limits of American commitments to equity around race, gender, LGBTQ and disabilities since the Civil Rights era.  She is co-editor with Tiago Saraiva of the journal History & Technology.

Dr. Susan Jones is the Distinguished McKnight University Pressor in Ecology, Evolution, and Behavior, and in the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine at the University of Minnesota. Trained first as a Doctor of Veterinary Medicine, Dr. Jones also received a PhD in the history of science and medicine at Penn. Her expertise is the historical ecology of disease, comparative and environmental health, and human-animal relationships. Dr. Jones is the recipient of both Guggenheim and Fullbright Fellowships, and is the author of the 2003 book Valuing Animals: Veterinarians and their Patients in Modern America, the 2010 book Death in a Small Package: A Short History of Anthrax, and dozens of scholarly articles and book chapters. She currently is working on a global environmental history of plague.

Dr. Pratik Chakrabarti is the Cullen NEH Chair in History at the University of Houston. He has written extensively on the history of science, medicine, and imperialism in South Asia, the Atlantic World, and the Caribbean from the 18th to the 20th centuries. Dr. Chakrabarti is the author of several stunning books, including Western Science in Modern India (2004), Materials and Medicine (2010), Bacteriology in British India (2012), and the 2020 book, Inscriptions of Nature: Geology and the Naturalization of Antiquity. For several years he was both the Director of the Center for the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine at the University of Manchester in the UK, and editor of the journal Social History of Medicine. Pratik is currently working on the history of postcolonial public health in India and on a project about global vaccine research.

My guest is Donald F. Kettl.  He is the Sid Richardson Professor at the LBJ School at UT Austin.  He previously served as dean in the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland. He is also a nonresident senior fellow at the Volcker Alliance, the Brookings Institution and the Partnership for Public Service.

Kettl has authored or edited numerous books, including Can Governments Earn Our Trust? (2017); Little Bites of Big Data for Public Policy (2017); his most recent: The Divided States of America: Why Federalism Doesn’t Work (2020).

Pamela Addison is the widow of a brave healthcare worker who lost his life to Covid at the start of this pandemic when her children were just 5 months and 2 years old.  Since her late husband’s death she has become a covid loss advocate focusing on the young children who have lost a parent/caregiver to Covid, the forgotten grievers. She also founded the group Young Widows and Widowers of Covid-19 several months after losing her late husband so no other young widow would feel alone on this unexpected and difficult journey of love, loss and grief. She hopes her story can make a difference and create change especially for the youngest victims of this pandemic, the children.

Danya Glabau is an STS scholar and medical anthropologist, and Industry Assistant Professor and Director of the Science and Technology Studies program in the department of Technology, Culture, and Society at NYU Tandon School of Engineering. Her research examines health activism, the political economy of biomedicine, and how human bodies become valuable data. Her book Food Allergy Advocacy: Parenting and the Politics of Care (University of Minnesota Press 2022), examines the reproductive politics of food allergy advocacy in the United States. Her second book project, Cyborg (MIT Press), is co-authored with Laura Forlano and will offer an introduction to feminist cyborg theory for scholarly, technical, and non-scholarly audiences.

Charles B. Strozier is Professor Emeritus of History, John Jay College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York; and a practicing psychoanalyst.  He has twice been nominated for a Pulitzer Prize (2001 and 2011) and was a finalist for the Lincoln Prize (2017).  He is the author of scores of articles on history and psychoanalysis and the author or editor of 13 books, including Heinz Kohut: The Making of a Psychoanalyst (Farrar, Straus & Giroux); Until The Fires Stopped Burning: 9/11 and New York City in the Words and Experiences of Survivors and Witnesses in 2011 (Columbia University Press).  

Kathleen Ossip’s most recent book of poems, July, was one of NPR’s Best Books of 2021. She is also the author of The Do-Over, which was a New York Times Editors' Choice; The Cold War, which was one of Publishers Weekly's Best Books of 2011; The Search Engine, selected by Derek Walcott for the American Poetry Review/Honickman First Book Prize; and Cinephrastics, a chapbook of movie poems. Her poems have appeared widely in such publications as The Washington Post, The Best American Poetry, The Best American Magazine Writing, The New York Review of Books, The Nation, The New Republic, The Believer, Poetry, Paris Review, and many others. She has received a fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts, and she has been a fellow at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute. She teaches at the New School and at Princeton University. 

Prof. Michal Grivna is a leading expert in injury control and safety promotion. Prof. Grivna´s research included topics related to childhood and adolescent injuries, school safety, traffic safety, baby walker injuries, child vehicle occupant protection, playground injuries, trauma registration and other public health issues. He is collaborating as a consultant with various public health and preventive medicine institutions in the United Arab Emirates and abroad, including Department of Health Abu Dhabi and Dubai Health Authority. He played a leading role in activities of the European Child Safety Alliance and implementation of WHO Safe Community Program. He is currently a mentor of young scientists in WHO Violence and Injury Prevention Mentorship Program.

Yasin Jemal Yasin holds BSc degree in Environmental Health from Haramaya University, Ethiopia, Masters Degree in Public Health (MPH) from Addis Ababa University, Ethiopia, and MSc in Environmental Sciences from King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals (KFUPM), Saudi Arabia, and a certificate in Clinical Research from Harvard Medical School, Harvard University, USA. He is also a faculty member in School of Public Health, College of Health Sciences, Mekelle Univeristy, Ethiopia. He is a 3rd year Ph.D student in the Institute of Public Health, College of Medicine and Health Sciences, United Arab Emirates University (UAEU), UAE. My Ph.D thesis title is "Risk factors affecting the patterns and severity of road traffic collisions: Global and UAE perspective."

Spencer Bokat-Lindell is an editor and writer based in Brooklyn. He is currently a staff editor for The New York Times, where he writes Debatable, a newsletter that surveys the spectrum of opinion on some of the week's most pressing disagreements. Over the past two years, he has written about the ethics and politics of vaccine mandates, school reopenings, global vaccine inequities, the lab-leak hypothesis, and the responsibility of Big Tech companies in combating COVID misinformation, among other pandemic-related debates. Before joining The Times, Spencer served on the editorial staffs of Harper’s Magazine, The Paris Review, and Axios. He graduated from Yale in 2017.

Ashton M. Verdery, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor of Sociology, Demography, and Computational and Data Science at the Pennsylvania State University. His research focuses on how changes in social and family networks influence health.

Peter Chin-Hong is Associate Dean for Regional Campuses of the UCSF school of medicine. He is a medical educator who specializes in treating infectious diseases, particularly infections that develop in patients who have suppressed immune systems. He directs the immunocompromised host infectious diseases program at UCSF. His research focuses on donor derived infections in transplant recipients and molecular diagnostics of infectious diseases in patients with suppressed immune systems. At UCSF he is Professor of Medicine and Director of the Yearlong Inquiry Program in the School of Medicine. He was the inaugural holder of the Academy of Medical Educators Endowed Chair for Innovation in Teaching.

Alessandra Jerolleman is an Associate Professor and the Director of the Doctoral Program in Emergency Management at Jacksonville State University’in Alabama.  She is a community resilience specialist and applied researcher at the Lowlander Center, as well as a co-founder of Hazard Resilience, a United States based consultancy providing leadership and expertise in disaster recovery, risk reduction, and hazard policy.   In 2019 she published a book titled: Disaster Recovery through the Lens of Justice, and recently released a follow up edited volume Justice, Equity, and Emergency Management.  Dr. Jerolleman is a subject matter expert in climate adaptation, hazard mitigation, disaster recovery, and resilience with a long history of working in the public, private, and nonprofit sectors. 

Dr. Sharrelle Barber is a social epidemiologist and scholar-activist in the Dornsife School of Public Health, Drexel University.  Her research focuses on the intersection of "place, race, and health" and examines the role of structural racism in shaping health and racial/ethnic health inequities among Blacks in the United States and Brazil.

Dr. Barber currently serves as the Director of The Ubuntu Center on Racism, Global Movements, and Population Health Equity, which launched November 11, 2021. 

Dr. Barber's empirical work and academic commentary has been published in leading academic journals including The Lancet Infectious Disease, the American Journal of Public Health, and Social Science and Medicine. Dr. Barber has also lectured and taught nationally and internationally about the impact of racism on health inequities and serves on the Group for Racial Equality (GRacE) International Advisory Board for The Lancet.

Professor Lucy Easthope is a leading authority on recovering from disaster. For over two decades she has challenged others to think differently about what comes next, after tragic events. She is a passionate and thought-provoking voice in an area that few know about: emergency planning. However in the time of the Covid-19 pandemic, her work has become decidedly more mainstream. She has particular interest in the support of children and young people after disaster.

She advised government departments, corporations, emergency and health services and charities during the pandemic. Her book ‘When The Dust Settles’ is published in March 2022. She is known globally for her work and holds research positions in the UK and New Zealand. She is a Professor in Practice of Risk and Hazard at the University of Durham where she Co-Founded the After Disaster Network and is a Fellow in Mass Fatalities and Pandemics at the Centre for Death and Society, University of Bath.  

Elizabeth Outka is Professor of English at the University of Richmond. Her latest book, Viral Modernism: The Influenza Pandemic and Interwar Literature (Columbia University Press 2020), investigates how one of the deadliest plagues in history—the 1918-1919 influenza pandemic—silently reshaped the modernist era, infusing everything from T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, to the emergence of viral zombies, to the popularity of séances. She is the recipient of numerous awards and grants, including a Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

She has written on topics ranging from consumer culture, to postcolonial representations of trauma, to disability studies. Her first book was Consuming Traditions: Modernity, Modernism, and the Commodified Authentic (Oxford University Press 2009; 2012). Her essays have appeared in Modernism/modernity, NOVEL, Contemporary Literature, The Paris Review Daily and many edited collections.

Susan Ferguson is Associate Professor Emerita at Wilfrid Laurier in Canada. Prior to joining the academy, she worked as a journalist for Maclean's, Canada's national news magazine. Ferguson is a Marxist-Feminist scholar and activist, who has been reading, writing and thinking about social reproduction theory for many years. Her published work includes articles on feminist theory, childhood and capitalism, and Canadian political discourse. Her book, Women and Work: Social Reproduction, Feminism and Labour was published in 2020 by Pluto Press. Ferguson is also a member of Faculty4Palestine and on the editorial board of Midnight Sun. She is currently living in Houston, Texas.

Jason Abaluck is a professor of economics in the Yale University school of management. His work lies at the intersection of public finance, behavioral economics, health economics and industrial organization. His research focuses on the detection of mistakes and the design of institutions when consumers or providers make mistakes in contexts such as health plan choice, dietary choice, or the provision of medical care.

Tara Haelle is a freelance science journalist and photojournalist who serves as the AHCJ Core Topic Leader for Medical Studies. She particularly specializes in reporting on vaccines, pediatrics, maternal health, obesity, nutrition, mental health and medical research in general, and she regularly speaks on vaccine hesitancy. Her work has appeared in Elemental, Scientific American, New York Times, Forbes, Politico, Slate, NOVA, Wired and Science, and she writes and covers medical conferences regularly for Medscape and MDEdge.

Monica H. Green is a historian of medicine, currently serving as Suppes Visiting Professor of the History of Science at Stanford University. She specializes in the premodern period and global infectious diseases. She is writing a book on the Black Death that draws on evidence from genetics, archaeology, and historical sources to document the early origin and broad geographic extent of the 2nd Plague Pandemic.

Cecília Tomori is Associate Professor and Director of Global Public Health and Community Health at Johns Hopkins School of Nursing. She is an anthropologist and public health scholar who studies breastfeeding and reproduction, health inequities, and how corporate interests shape health and policy.

Eleanor Murray is an assistant professor at Boston University School of Public Health who focuses on improving methods for evidence-based decision-making and human-data interaction. Her work primarily focuses on applications to public health and clinical epidemiology, including applications to HIV, HPV, cancer, cardiovascular disease, psychiatric disorders, musculoskeletal disorders, social and environmental epidemiology, and maternal and adolescent health. Dr. Murray also conducts meta-research evaluating bias in existing research. During the COVID pandemic, Dr. Murray has been working on improving science communication about epidemiology and public health concepts, and identifying and addressing barriers to equitable vaccination distribution and acceptance.

Timothy Gitzen is a sociocultural anthropologist and postdoctoral fellow in the Society of Fellows in the Humanities at The University of Hong Kong. His research focuses on the intersections of security, surveillance, queer politics, and science and technology. His work has been published in positions, Transgender Studies Quarterly, Cultural Studies, and is forthcoming in Current Anthropology.

Dr. Chavi Eve Karkowsky attended medical school at Mount Sinai Icahn School of Medicine in New York City. She then finished internship and residency in obstetrics and gynecology at the integrated program at Brigham and Women's Hospital and Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, followed by a fellowship in Maternal-Fetal Medicine (MFM).  Dr. Karkowsky continues to work as a high risk obstetrics specialist in New York City, where she leads initiatives in outpatient care. She also writes for the public, with publications in Slate, the Atlantic, the Washington Post, and elsewhere; her first book, "High Risk: Stories of Pregnancy, Birth, and the Unexpected" (Norton/Liveright 2020) was published in 2020.

Justin Feldman is a social epidemiologist and a Health and Human Rights Fellow at the Harvard FXB Center for Health & Human Rights. His research looks how racism and economic inequality influence population health. This work has addressed multiple domains including police violence, residential segregation, and the toll of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Helen Tilley is a professor of History at Northwestern University.  Her book, Africa as a Living Laboratory: Empire, Development, and the Problem of Scientific Knowledge (Chicago, 2011) explores the dynamic interplay between scientific research and imperialism in British Africa between 1870 and 1950. It received the Ludwik Fleck Prize from the Society for the Social Studies of Science (2014). She has also written articles and book chapters on the history of ecology, eugenics, agriculture, and epidemiology in tropical Africa, and is co-editor with Robert Gordon of Ordering Africa: Anthropology, European Imperialism and the Politics of Knowledge (Manchester, 2007) and with Michael Gordin and Gyan Prakash of Utopia-Dystopia: Historical Conditions of Possibility (Princeton, 2010).

Her current project focuses on the history of African decolonization, global governance, and the ethnoscientific projects that accompanied state building in the colonial and Cold War era. At Northwestern, she directs Science in Human Culture and holds a Faculty Fellowship with the Buffett Institute for Global Studies. She is also affiliated with the programs in African Studies, Global Health, Legal Studies, and Environmental Policy and Culture.

Rabbi Mike Harvey is a Resident Chaplain within the IU Health system in Indianapolis, Indiana.  He was ordained from Hebrew Union College – Jewish Institute of Religion in 2015 and is a strong proponent of interfaith dialogue and communication.  His book “Let’s Talk: A Rabbi Speaks to Christians” will be published by Fortress Press in Summer 2022.  Rabbi Harvey also hosts a podcast with an Episcopal Priest entitled “A Priest and a Rabbi Walk into a Bar.”  For more information on Rabbi Harvey, go to www.RabbiMichaelHarvey.com.

Dr. Sharon L. Walker, PhD, is Dean of Drexel’s College of Engineering and Distinguished Professor in the Department of Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering. A Yale University-trained water quality systems expert focusing on the fate and transport of bacteria and nanoparticles in water, Walker is also a fellow in the Association of Environmental Engineering and Science Professors (AEESP) and in the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).

She is a winner of the Fulbright Fellowship, for which she visited at Ben Gurion University of the Negev in Israel; received an NSF Career Award in 2010; and held an ELATE fellowship from 2014-15. Walker has produced more than 250 conference papers and publications, and in 2018 won the AEESP inaugural Mary Ann Liebert Award for Publication Excellence in Environmental Engineering Science.

Hyunah Keum is a master's candidate at the Graduate School of Science and Technology Policy, in Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology. She recently finished her master’s thesis titled “Making Waste Acceptable and Invisible: The COVID-19 Pandemic and Material Politics of Plastic Waste in South Korea,” where she argues that plastic waste has not just increased in Korea during COVID-19 pandemic, a time when the government both allowed discard of disposable plastics and invisibilized the infrastructure to treat those wastes. She wants to expand her area of research into revealing unequal relationships around waste, and its impacts on different beings, humans and non-humans. 

Hyon Soo Jeong is a master's candidate at the Graduate School of Science and Technology Policy in KAIST. She is interested in data sharing during COVID-19, and her internship experience at United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) Seoul Policy Center inspired her to study public-private partnerships driven by Information and Communication Technology. Her Master's thesis is titled “A study of coproduction for information sharing during COVID-19: focusing on the case of citizen-developed map services in South Korea,” and her study focuses on how Korean civil society's action of information sharing driven by open government data influenced COVID-19 policy in South Korea.

Hana Kim is an assistant professor of School of Humanities & Social Sciences at Korea Advanced Institute of Science & Technology, Republic of Korea. She received a Ph.D. in Energy and Environmental Policy from University of Delaware, United States. Her research interests are equity issues related to energy and climate change policies, energy transition, and non-state stakeholders’ responses to climate changes. Currently, she is working on several research projects related to sustainability issues in urban areas as well. 

June-Yi Lee is Associate Professor of Research Center for Climate Sciences, Pusan National University; and Associate Project Leader of Institute for Basic Science Center for Climate Physics. She holds a Ph.D. Atmospheric Sciences, Seoul National University, Seoul, Korea. Earth system predictability including not only physical variables but also biogeochemical cycle on intraseasonal-interannual-to-interdecadal time scales. She is a Core Writing Team member, IPCC 6th Assessment Synthesis Report.

Kevin Cokley, Ph.D. holds the Oscar and Anne Mauzy Regents Professorship for Educational Research and Development in the College of Education at the University of Texas at Austin. He is a Fellow of the University of Texas System and University of Texas Academy of Distinguished Teachers, Chair of the Department of Educational Psychology, Professor of Educational Psychology and African and African Diaspora Studies, and past Director of the Institute for Urban Policy Research & Analysis.   He holds the title of Distinguished Psychologist and received the Scholarship Award from the Association of Black Psychologists. He has written several Op-Eds in major media outlets on topics such as Blacks’ rational mistrust of police, the aftermath of Ferguson, police and race relations, racism and White supremacy, the use of school vouchers, and racial disparities in school discipline. His research has been recognized in media outlets including the New York Times, USA Today, and Inside Higher Education.

Philip Zelikow is the White Burkett Miller Professor of History at the University of Virginia, where he has also served as dean of the Graduate School and director of the Miller Center. His scholarly work has focused on critical episodes in American and world history. 

He was a trial and appellate lawyer and then a career diplomat before taking academic positions at Harvard, then Virginia.  His government career includes federal service during five administrations positions in the White House, State Department, and the Pentagon. His last full-time government position was as the counselor of the Department of State, a deputy to Secretary Condoleezza Rice. 

He was the executive director of the 9/11 Commission. 

He is one of the few individuals ever to serve on the President’s Intelligence Advisory Boards for presidents of both parties, in the administrations of George W. Bush and Barack Obama. 

"Rob Verchick is one of the nation’s leading scholars in disaster and climate change law and a former EPA official in the Obama administration. He teaches at Loyola University New Orleans and at Tulane University. He also hosts the podcast, “CPR’s Connect the Dots,” which focuses on climate justice, health and safety, and improving democracy."

Rob Verchick holds the Gauthier-St. Martin Chair in Environmental Law at Loyola University New Orleans. He is also a Senior Fellow at Tulane University's Disaster Resilience Leadership Academy, in the School of Social Work, and President of the Center for Progressive Reform, a national policy institute focused on public health, public welfare, and environmental protection.  Professor Verchick served in the Obama administration as Deputy Associate Administrator for Policy at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in 2009 and 2010

His work has appeared in many venues, including the California Law Review, the Southern California Law Review, and the environmental law journals at Harvard, Stanford, and Berkeley. He is the author of three books, including Facing Catastrophe: Environmental Action for a Post-Katrina World (Harvard University Press 2010) which was selected as a CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title by the American Library Association.

Jon Mooallem is a longtime writer at large with The New York Times Magazine and a contributor to numerous other radio shows and magazines, including This American Life, The Daily, 99% Invisible, California Sunday and Wired. He's frequently talked about his reporting on radio and television shows (like Fresh Air, Radiolab, and The Colbert Report) and at the TED conference in Vancouver. Occasionally, he collaborates on live storytelling and music projects with members of the Decemberists.

Jon's most recent book, THIS IS CHANCE!, tells the story of the 1964 Great Alaskan Earthquake and radio reporter Genie Chance. The Wall Street Journal called it "A powerful, heart-wrenching book, as much art as it is journalism." Amazon, Buzzfeed and Brainpickings selected THIS IS CHANCE! as one of the best books of 2020 and it’s in the process of being adapted into a film. His last book, Wild Ones was chosen as a notable book of the year by The New York Times Book Review, The New Yorker, NPR’s Science Friday, and Canada’s National Post, among others. He lives on Bainbridge Island, next to Seattle. During the pandemic, he's primarily been a father. Also, he built a fence.

This Is Chance!: The Shaking of An American City, A Voice that Held it Together

Dr. Esther Chernak.  Esther  is a professor in the Department of Environmental Health, Drexel University School of Public Health, and has a position in the Drexel University College of Medicine. She is the director of the Center for Public Health Readiness and Communication at Drexel. Prior to joining the Drexel faculty in 2010, Dr. Chernak worked at the Philadelphia Department of Public Health for over 25 years. She is a regular contributor to COVIDCalls.

Tom Hipper is the Associate Director of the Center for Public Health Readiness and Communication (CPHRC) at the Drexel University Dornsife School of Public Health, where he recently managed a CDC-funded grant project designed to address the disaster information needs of children with special health care needs. He is  Assistant Teaching Faculty at Drexel University, where he teaches courses in crisis and risk communication. Mr. Hipper is also a Fellow of the Center for Risk Communication.

Cassie Alexander is a registered nurse of fourteen years -- burn, critical care transport, and ICU -- and a paranormal romance author. Her most recent book is Year of the Nurse: A 2020 COVID-19 Pandemic Memoir about her experiences working in a covid ward in 2020. 

Chimére L. Smith is a writer and thought leader who has appeared on MSNBC Live with Craig Melvin, The Washington Post, Medium, and on PBS NewsHour. Since June 2020, she has used her social media platforms, engagement in grass-root Covid-19 support groups (notably Body Politic and BIPOC Women Long Covid “Long Hauler” Support Group), and strong media presence to raise awareness about the importance of Black voices in conversations on the prevention, treatment, and research of Long Covid in urban communities. In December 2020, she was a featured patient-led panelist at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) workshop on Post-Acute Covid. Chimére is an independent member of The Long Covid Alliance and a recently-appointed board member of Body Politic. In April 2021, Smith was praised for her heart-wrenching and brazen testimony during a bipartisan Congressional hearing on Long Covid after becoming the first Black woman to detail her Long Covid experience.

Jason Steinhauer served as Founding Director of the Lepage Center for History in the Public Interest; is currently a Global Fellow at The Woodrow Wilson Center and a Senior Fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute; a contributor to TIME and CNN; a past editorial board member of The Washington Post "Made By History" section; and a Presidential Counselor of the National WWII Museum.  In 2020, he founded the History Club on Clubhouse, which he hosts regularly. The club has more than 100,000 members and averages 2,500 participants per week.

William W. Li, MD, is an internationally renowned physician, scientist and author of the New York Times bestseller “Eat to Beat Disease: The New Science of How Your Body Can Heal Itself.” His groundbreaking work has led to the development of more than 30 new medical treatments and impacts care for more than 70 diseases including cancer, diabetes, blindness, heart disease and obesity. His TED Talk, “Can We Eat to Starve Cancer?” has garnered more than 11 million views. Dr. Li has been featured in USA Today, Time Magazine, The Atlantic and O Magazine. He is president and medical director of the Angiogenesis Foundation and is leading research into COVID-19. 

Dolly Jørgensen is Professor of History, University of Stav-anger, Norway specializing in histories of environment and technology. Her current research agenda focuses on cultural histories of animal extinction, and she recently published Recovering Lost Species in the Modern Age: Histories of Longing and Belonging (MIT Press, 2019). She is co-editor-in-chief of the journal Environmental Humanities and co-directs The Greenhouse environmental humanities program area at University of Stavanger.

Martha Greenwald is the Founding Director, creator, and curator of the The WhoWeLost Project, which includes the websites WhoWeLost.org and WhoWeLostKY.org.  She is the author of the poetry collection Other Prohibited Items, which won the Mississippi Review Prize for Poetry. In 2020, she was the first prize winner of the Yeats Poetry Award. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, Rattle, Nurture, Slate, Best New Poets, The Threepenny Review, and numerous other journals.  She has been both a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford and a Pearl Hogrefe Fellow at Iowa State. She taught creative writing, literature, and ESL at the high school and college level for nearly twenty years. She is working on another poetry collection, a memoir called "Shivah Bullies," and seeking a publisher for an anthology of stories from the WhoWeLost Project.

Dr. Marjorie Roberts is a Certified Life Coach and Speaker who coaches her clients how to create the life of their dreams even after this life-altering virus, COVID-19. Living through this life-altering illness and learning to navigate life differently, she has  a real-time experience with what her clients deal with daily.

Dr. Marjorie's dynamic and authentic coaching style creates trust, motivates, and moves people toward positive change with actionable results. She assists her clients in finding their deep inner happiness after pain, helping them define and achieve goals as they consistently live a more joyful life.

She attended Capella University and obtained a Doctorate Of Business Administration with a Specialization in Strategy and Innovation in 2014. Additionally, Dr. Marjorie gained her Life Coaching Certification in November of 2019.

Justin L. Mann is an assistant professor of English and African American Studies at Northwestern University. He has research and teaching interests in African American literature, Black feminist theory, Black speculative fiction, and security policy. His current book project, Breaking the World: Black Insecurity after the New World Order argues that Black speculative fictions are a critical but overlooked archive for understanding America’s security ambitions since the Reagan Administration. Bringing works by Octavia E. Butler, Walter Mosley, Colson Whitehead, and N.K. Jemisin (among others) into conversation with “white papers” Breaking The World argues that Black speculation rejects the false promises of securitization by figuring insecurity as a central mode for making political and social worlds. In his recent article “Black Insecurity at the End of the World,” published in Oct by MELUS, Dr. Mann examines the racialization of disease in Colson Whitehead’s zombie novel, Zone One, arguing that the novel offers different and distinct frames for understanding how disease maps onto logic of racial difference. Dr. Mann’s work has also appeared in the journals Feminist Theory, Surveillance & Society, Feminist Studies, and elsewhere.

A graduate of the MD/MBA program at the University of Kansas School of Medicine in Kansas City, Tom Irwin worked as an opera singer and bass player for nearly two decades before medical school. Since making a living as a musician requires other work as well, his other employment has included professional sound and musical instrument sales, officiating in minor-league hockey, and producing television news in Louisiana and Tennessee. A native of New Orleans, he has degrees in music from the University of New Orleans and the University of Northern Colorado, and he and his meteorologist wife have two children. He is currently doing a research year with the University of Kansas Cancer Center's Melanoma Project.

Kyle Cleveland is Associate Professor of Sociology at Temple University’s Japan Campus (TUJ), where he is Faculty Director of Study Abroad and Honors Programming.   He is the founding director of the university's Institute of Contemporary Asian Studies (ICAS), which organizes cross-disciplinary programming for public lectures and academic symposia, including a series of lectures and symposia related the 3/11 Tohoku disasters.  Since 2011, he has done extensive ethnographic fieldwork in Fukushima, interviewing nuclear refugees, prefectural mayors, military officials, anti-nuclear activists and nuclear industry experts. He is writing a book on the political dimensions of radiation assessment in the Fukushima nuclear crisis, examining how foreign governments in Japan responded to the crisis. He is co-editor (with Scott Knowles and Ryuma Shineha of the book “Legacies of Fukushima: 3/11 in Context,” published by University of Pennsylvania Press (forthcoming in May of 2021). 

Wendy E. Parmet is the George J. and Kathleen Waters Matthews Distinguished Professor of Law and Professor of Public Policy and Urban Affairs at Northeastern University, where she is the faculty director of the Center on Health Policy and Law. Professor Parmet is the author of numerous law review and peer reviewed articles. Her books include The Health of Newcomers: Immigration, Health Policy and the Case for Global Solidarity, co-authored with Patricia Illingworth (2017, NYU Press), Populations, Public Health, and the Law (2009, Georgetown University Press) and the forthcoming Constitutional Contagion, How Constitutional Law is Killing Us. (2023, Cambridge Univ. Press). Professor Parmet is also Associate Editor for Law and Ethics for the American Journal of Public Health.

Jenny Pickerill is a Professor of Environmental Geography and Head of Department of Geography at Sheffield University, England. Her research focuses on inspiring grassroots solutions to environmental problems and in hopeful and positive ways in which we can change social practices. She has published 3 books (Cyberprotest; Anti-war Activism; Eco-Homes) and over 30 articles on themes around eco-housing, eco-communities, social justice and environmentalism. She is currently completing a book on Eco-communities: Living Together Differently.

Mackenzie Jones is the Health Education Specialist for the Montana Disability and Health Program at the Montana Department of Public Health and Human Services and the Accessibility liaison for the APHA Disability Section.

Hana Meshesha is a doctoral candidate at the Department of Counseling, University of Montana and the Mentoring co-chair for the APHA Disability Section Mentorship program.

Meg Ann Traci is a senior scientist and research associate professor at the University of Montana Rural Institute for Inclusive Communities with nearly thirty years of experience in the field of disability and health.

Dr. Clarke is a Professor in the Department of Epidemiology at the University of Michigan's School of Public Health. She is also a Research Professor at the University of Michigan's Institute for Social Research. Her work examines the social determinants of disability, with a particular focus on the built environment for older adults aging in place.

Kim TallBear is a Professor in the Faculty of Native Studies, University of Alberta, and Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Peoples, Technoscience, and Society. She is a citizen of the Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate in South Dakota. Dr. TallBear is the author of the book Native American DNA: Tribal Belonging and the False Promise of Genetic Science. Building on her research on the role of science in settler colonialism, TallBear also studies the roles of the overlapping ideas of “sexuality” and “nature” in colonization of Indigenous peoples. She is a regular commentator in US, Canadian, and UK media outlets on issues related to Indigenous peoples, science, technology, and Indigenous sexualities. She is a regular panelist on the weekly podcast, Media Indigena. She tweets on these topics and more at @KimTallBear. Her research websites include www.IndigenousSTS.com and www.re-lab.ca. You can also follow her occasional posts on her Substack newsletter, Unsettle: Indigenous affairs, cultural politics & (de)colonization, https://kimtallbear.substack.com. 

Brianne Benness is the host of No End In Sight, a podcast about life with chronic illness, and the creator of #NEISVoid, an active community hashtag for questions and conversations about life with chronic illness across diagnosis and diagnostic status. Brianne is also a co-founder of Stories We Don’t Tell, a candid Toronto storytelling event, podcast and anthology. Brianne holds a post-graduate certificate in Media and Medicine from Harvard Medical School and a Master of Architecture from the University of Michigan. Some of her recent work includes her TEDx talk “Disease Begins Before Diagnosis” and a Spring 2021 short course at Grinnell College “Personal Storytelling for Social Impact.”

Suzanne Brennan Firstenberg is a visual artist who has demonstrated the power of art to touch hundreds of thousands of lives. In the Fall of 2020, images of her In America: How could this happen…art installation graced over six hundred news articles on six continents, making visible the pandemic’s cost in American lives.  Her art created a national space for mourning.

Firstenberg believes art has incredible power to educate, inspire, and change the lens through which viewers understand social issues. Interviews, research, and reading ground her work on topics that include gun violence, Native Americans, homelessness, and political partisanship.  The underlying theme is upholding individual dignity, a value honed through her twenty-five years of hospice volunteering.

She travelled to twenty-four states and interviewed hundreds of people in preparation for her newly completed EMPTY FIX project, a seven-installation art series to decrease societal stigma surrounding drug addiction. She had represented the United States at the Harbin (China) International Ice/Snow Sculpting Competition (2016) and has work accessioned by the Smithsonian.

Tom Ewing is a professor of history and associate dean at Virginia Tech. His current research projects include studies of influenza pandemics, including the 1889-1892 Russian flu and the 1918-1919 Spanish flu, and a history of Virginia’s first tuberculosis sanatoria, Catawba and Piedmont, in collaboration with Katherine Randall and Kiana Wilkerson. In 2020, he worked with graduate students from Virginia Tech to understand the use of masks during the 1918 pandemic, which resulted in essays published in the Washington Post, Health Affairs blog, Items (SSRC), and Nursing Clio.

Katherine Randall is a visiting lecturer of technical communication at the University of Central Florida. Her most recent research projects include a rhetorical history of the scientific understanding around airborne transmission, a history of Piedmont and Catawba tuberculosis sanatoria, and an exploration of the role of health communication in refugee resettlement in the United States.

Salonee Bhaman is a PhD candidate in the department of History and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Yale University. Her research explores the intersections of care work, welfare policy, and social provision in the United States. Her dissertation project focuses on questions of political economy, migration, and intimate regulation during the first decades of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the United States. 

Vipul Shah is the Medical Director and Consultant for pediatric orthopedics, pediatric spine and scoliosis at R .P. Shah Memorial Trust for children with Disabilities in Lucknow, India.  He is Medical Director of the R P Shah Memorial trust against Covid 19.  A graduate of GSVM Medical College, Kanpur, India He is also Patient Care Coordinator for UNICEF.  He was the 1st Non American candidate to win the prestigious CART Fellowship of the American Academy of Cerebral Palsy and Developmental Medicine.  He is a Mentor of the American Academy of Cerebral Palsy and Developmental Medicine since 2017.

Vipul Shah is the Medical Director and Consultant for pediatric orthopedics, pediatric spine and scoliosis at R .P. Shah Memorial Trust for children with Disabilities in Lucknow, India.  He is Medical Director of the R P Shah Memorial trust against Covid 19.  A graduate of GSVM Medical College, Kanpur, India He is also Patient Care Coordinator for UNICEF.  He was the 1st Non American candidate to win the prestigious CART Fellowship of the American Academy of Cerebral Palsy and Developmental Medicine.  He is a Mentor of the American Academy of Cerebral Palsy and Developmental Medicine since 2017.

Elizabeth Ellcessor is an associate professor of media studies at the University of Virginia, and a senior faculty fellow at the Miller Center for Public Affairs. Her research focuses on media access as a variable and uneven phenomenon that advantages some and marginalizes others. She is the author of Restricted Access: Media, Disability, and the Politics of Participation and of In Case of Emergency: How Technologies Mediate Crisis and Normalize Inequality, which is forthcoming in Spring 2022.

Lisa McCorkell is a co-founder and patient-researcher with Patient-Led Research Collaborative, a group of people with Long COVID who conducted the first and most comprehensive research on Long COVID. As a result of her research with PLRC, she has testified to Congress, presented to the White House COVID-19 Health Equity Task Force, and been featured in The Atlantic and The Wall Street Journal. In her day job, she is a policy analyst at the California Department of Social Services. She received a Masters in Public Policy from University of California, Berkeley, and a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science from University of California, Los Angeles. 

Today I welcome Long COVID activists Teresa Tindle Akintonwa and Lisa McCorkell to #COVIDCalls

Jennifer Sullivan lives outside of Portland, Oregon. She is a part-time community college instructor and also works in social media marketing. Her mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer's from a Traumatic Brain Injury in 2014 and Jennifer became her mother's family caregiver and advocate. Her mother was in a memory care home when the COVID pandemic lockdowns began in March of 2020. Jennifer made it her mission to TRY and find a way to safely visit her mother, to provide the physical contact, hugs and kisses that her mom needed. Instead her mother got COVID in an outbreak in her memory care and passed away in August 2020. To help herself heal, Jennifer started a podcast where she interviews people who have lost loved ones to COVID.

Let’s turn to the discussion I had with Katherine Browne and Laurian Farrell as part of the Toronto Intl. Festival of Authors.

Nanjala Nyabola is a writer and researcher based in Nairobi, Kenya. Her work focuses on the intersection between technology, media, and society. In addition to academic writing, she writes analysis and commentary for numerous publications around the world and  is the author of Digital Democracy, Analogue Politics: How the Internet Era is Transforming Politics in Kenya (Zed Books, 2018) and Travelling While Black: Essays Inspired by a Life on the Move (Hurst Books, 2020). 

Orla Muldoon is a professor of social psychology at the University of Limerick.  She studies ways that social contexts and in particular social systems and structures can shape behaviour, attitudes and health. She regularly contribute to the new media and in particular offer opinion editorials in the Irish Times.  She is a current member of the Irish Research Council and serve on the Behaviour and communications committee advising the National Public Health Emergency Team (NPHET).  She is currently managing an ERC Advanced grant that explores whether adversity, trauma and its psychological consequences are driven by social identity change; and a HRB-IRC funded project that is exploring the value of social solidarity to public adherence to health messaging during COVID19.

Hyomin Kim is an Associate Professor, School of Liberal Arts, of the Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology. Her research interests include the co-production of knowledge, values, identities and authority around technoscience. She has performed research projects in the field of public engagement with science and technology (PEST).  She is the co-author of “Public Deliberation on South Korean Nuclear Power Plants: How Can Lay Knowledge Resist against Expertise?” (East Asian Science and Technology), and “Women and Men in Computer Science: Geeky Proclivities, College Rank, and Gender in Korea”

Emma Kowal is Professor of Anthropology at the Alfred Deakin Institute at Deakin University. She is a cultural and medical anthropologist who previously worked as a medical doctor and public health researcher in Indigenous health. Her research interests lie at the intersection of STS and Indigenous studies and have recently focused on the many iterations and resonances of ‘Indigenous DNA’. She has authored over 100 publications including the monograph Trapped in the Gap: Doing Good in Indigenous Australia and the collection Cryopolitics: Frozen Life in a Melting World. Her current book project is entitled Haunting Biology: Science and Indigeneity in Australia.

Jonathon Turnbull is a cultural and environmental geographer from the University of Cambridge. His PhD research, funded by the UK's Economic and Social Research Council, concerns the return of nature to the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone in Ukraine, where he has been working for the last two years with scientists studying different aspects of the Zone's ecology, especially dogs and wolves.

Adam Searle is a cultural and environmental geographer from the University of Liège in Belgium. His PhD research at Cambridge examined de/extinction—or bringing extinct animals back to life—building upon ethnographic work in the Spanish and French Pyrenees, and his postdoctoral research, funded by the European Research Council, concerns the use of biotechnologies in agriculture.

Minna Wybrecht is a 3rd year medical student at the University of Michigan, pursuing a specialty in family medicine. She grew up in Taiwan and Michigan. Her passions include translating between English and Mandarin, providing trauma-informed care, as well as addressing health care disparities. Outside of medicine, Minna is a dancer and a published poet. You can find her work in places such as the Journal of Medical Humanities.

Mayank Jayaram is a 3rd year medical student at the University of Michigan with a B.S. in physiology from Michigan State University. Mayank is interested in general surgery and plans to pursue a career in academic medicine where he can mentor the next generation of learners while also striving to improve healthcare inequities. In his free time, Mayank enjoys archery, chess, and research. He has published articles in JAMA and Nature affiliated journals.

My guest today! Gregg Gonsalves is an expert in policy modeling on infectious disease and substance use, as well as the intersection of public policy and health equity. His research focuses on the use of quantitative models for improving the response to epidemic diseases. For more than 30 years, he worked on HIV/AIDS and other global health issues with several organizations, including the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, the Treatment Action Group, Gay Men’s Health Crisis, and the AIDS and Rights Alliance for Southern Africa. He was also a fellow at the Open Society Foundations and in the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School from 2011-2012. He is a 2011 graduate of Yale College and received his PhD from Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences/School of Public Health in 2017. He is a 2018 MacArthur Fellow.

Frédéric Keck is a Senior Researcher at the Laboratory of Social Anthropology (CNRS-Collège de France-EHESS). After working on the history of social anthropology and contemporary biopolitical questions raised by avian influenza, he was the head of the research department of the musée du quai KAY Branly between 2014 and 2018. He published Avian Reservoirs. Virus Hunters and Birdwatchers in Chinese Sentinel Posts  (Duke University Press, 2020) and (with A. Kelly and C. Lynteris) Anthropology of Epidemics (Routledge, 2019).

Jon Shaffer is a Ph.D. candidate in sociology at Boston University. He is studying how global health NGOs resist dominant field pressures and develop alternative strategies in advancing state-protected universal health care access, social change, and human rights. Before starting graduate school, Jon was involved in the founding and served as the executive director of GlobeMed. He then served as the senior strategist for community organizing at Partners In Health, where he launched PIH Engage, a program that links trains activists around the country to fight for the right to health here and around the world. Most recently, Jon and colleagues launched R2H Action, a campaign to leverage the COVID-19 disaster to ensure that the human right to health and a safe environment is realized by everyone, everywhere. 

Renu Singh, PhD is a Research Assistant Professor within the Division of Public Policy, a Jockey Club Institute for Advanced Study Junior Fellow, and a Faculty Affiliate with the Institute for Emerging Market Studies at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST). She is also a Scholar at the O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law at Georgetown Law and a DAAD Research Ambassador for the German Academic Exchange Service. As a political scientist and microbiologist by training, Renu aims to bridge the worlds of science and policy through her research on comparative social policy, global health security and governance, and the political economy of health.

Lucia Vitale is an interdisciplinary global health scholar who uses comparative political science methods, theories in sociology, and also geography to explore multi-scale effects of global health governance and primary healthcare access. While her research is geographically located along the border of the Dominican Republic with Haiti, non-state transnational decision making spaces are central to her work. After graduating with her B.A. in 2015, Vitale taught English in Comayagua, Honduras, served as a Peace Corps volunteer in the Dominican Republic (DR), and then worked as a contractor for USAID’s Local Works program where she investigated access to documentation, and assessed the needs of cooperatives at the community level.

He currently serves as an Emeritus professor at Dept. of Microbiology in Catholic University, South Korea. In his academic training he conducted research in the Dept. of fermentation technology in Hiroshima University, Japan; He completed his post doctorate program at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke under the National Institute of Health(NIH) in the USA.

Welcome to episode 355 of the COVIDCalls, a daily discussion of the COVID-19 pandemic with a diverse collection of disaster experts. My name is Adia Benton and I'll be your guest host today. I am a cultural anthropologist of public health and medicine in post-conflict and “development” settings at Northwestern University in Evanston, IL.  I’m coming to you live from Oakland, California. Today I talk with anthropologist Amy Moran-Thomas, author of Traveling with Sugar: Chronicles of a Global Epidemic . 

Amy Moran-Thomas is Associate Professor of Anthropology at MIT, interested in the human and material entanglements that shape health in practice. She received her PhD in Anthropology from Princeton University in 2012, and held postdoctoral fellowships at Princeton and Brown, which is where we met, before going to MIT. Her writing often focuses on the social lives of medical objects. She also works on the cultural anthropology of intergenerational health, planetary change, and chronic conditions; as well as questions of equitable device design, technology and kinship, and the afterlives of "carbohydrates and hydrocarbons" across scales. ​Professor Moran-Thomas has conducted ethnographic and historical research in Belize, Guatemala, Ghana, Brazil and the U.S, supported by the Mellon-American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, the West African Research Association, and the American Philosophical Society. Her first book, Traveling with Sugar: Chronicles of a Global Epidemic (2019), examines the global rise of diabetes as part of the ongoing legacies of sweetness and power -- including how unequal access to insulin varieties, oxygen chambers, glucose meters, dialysis devices, farming machines, coral reef care, and prosthetic limb technologies can become part of how plantation histories live on in the present, impacting lives and landscapes across generations. She is the winner of the James A. and Ruth Levitan Research Prize in the Humanities at MIT, a Diabetes Foot Center Group Appreciation Award; the Curl Essay Prize, awarded by the Royal Anthropological Institute, and the David Schneider Award, American Anthropological Association, among others.   

Youngrim Kim is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Communication and Media at the University of Michigan, and a Rackham predoctoral fellow. She is interested in the social, cultural, and political implications of disaster information technologies in East Asia. She is currently writing a dissertation that examines South Korea’s technologically-driven infectious disease governance throughout the 2015 MERS Epidemic to the current COVID-19 pandemic, and how it relates to the issues of national identity, marginalization, and civic participation in crisis situations. 

Yuchen Chen is a third-year PhD student at Communication and Media at the University of Michigan. Her research looks at the transnational flow of technology, knowledge, labor, and capital and how it relates to social experiments in China. 

Dr. Vincent Covello, director of the Center for Risk Communication, is one of the world’s leading experts and practitioners on risk, high stress, and crisis communications. He is the author of more than 150 articles in scientific journals and the author/editor of more than 20 books. Dr. Covello is a consultant, writer, speaker, and teacher. He is a frequent keynote speaker and has conducted communication skills training for thousands. Dr. Covello has served as a risk, high concern, and crisis communications adviser to numerous public and private sectors organizations including over 400 of the 500 Fortune 500 companies, and with over 200 government agencies, including the World Health Organization, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the U.S. Department of Defense, and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. His work has been applied nationally and globally to a wide range of topics, including radiological incidents, disease outbreaks, industrial accidents, water contamination, air pollution, food safety, climate change, physician-patient communications, and organizational change. Most recently, he has worked closely with the 50 U.S. State Health Directors on their responses to questions from the media and the public on COVID-19.

Tom Hipper is the Associate Director of the Center for Public Health Readiness and Communication (CPHRC) at the Drexel University Dornsife School of Public Health, where he recently managed a CDC-funded grant project designed to address the disaster information needs of children with special health care needs. Mr. Hipper has also managed several projects related to communications during public health emergencies, including the creation of a library of social media messages for use by emergency response and public health spokespersons in different hazard scenarios. He is  Assistant Teaching Faculty at Drexel University, where he teaches courses in crisis and risk communication. Mr. Hipper is also a Fellow of the Center for Risk Communication where he works closely on many risk communication projects and trainings with the Center’s Director, Dr. Vincent Covello.

Christos Lynteris is a medical anthropologist, and senior lecture at the Univ. of St. Andrews in the UK. His research focuses on the anthropological and historical examination of epidemics, zoonosis, epidemiological epistemology, medical visual culture, colonial medicine, and epidemics as events posing an existential risk to humanity.

Dr Lynteris' new project (2019-2024) The Global War Against the Rat and the Epistemic Emergence of Zoonosis will examine the global history of a foundational but historically neglected process in the development of scientific approaches of zoonosis: the global war against the rat (1898-1948).

Dr Lynteris' recently completed project Visual Representations of the Third Plague Pandemic (2013-2018) collected and analysed photographs and other visual documents of the third plague pandemic (1855-1959).

For updates on Christos Lynteris' Global War Against the Rat and the Epistemic Emergence of Zoonosis and Visual Representations of the Third Plague Pandemic projects: @visualplague

Graham Mooney is an Associate Professor in the Dept of the History of Medicine at JHU. He has an adjunct appointment in the School of Public Health Dept of Epidemiolgy.

His book Intrusive Interventions: Public Health, Domestic Space, and Infectious Disease Surveillance in England 1840-1914 (University of Rochester Press, 2015), examines the history of public health interventions such as infectious disease notification, institutional and domestic isolation, disinfection, and contact tracing under late 19th/early 20th century liberalism. The book I'm working on right now is Harm City: Health and Injustice in Urban America is based on a class that I teach at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. I use a case study of race and class politics in Baltimore that explore the fracturing of public health systems and policy in neo-liberal American cities.

 Mary Dudziak is the Asa Griggs Candler Professor of Law at Emory University. Her most recent book is War Time: An Idea, Its History, Its Consequences (Oxford University Press, 2012). Her current book project argues that the culture of war death in the U.S. helps explain the decline of political restraints on the war powers. During the Covid era she has been obsessing over the way a mass death experience has, essentially, been normalized.

Dr. Aqsa Shaikh (She/Her) is an out and proud trans woman. She is Associate professor of Community Medicine, Nodal Officer for Covid Vaccination Centre, Hamdard Institute of Medical Sciences and Research. Aqsa is one of the investigators in Clinical trial of Sputnik V, investigator in TransCare Project, and WHO Unity Studies on Covid. She is co investigator in transgender studies on health access and medical curriculum at Sangath India. Aqsa is Founder-Director of Human Solidarity Foundation.

 David M. Neal, Ph.D., recently retired as Professor Emeritus in Fire and Emergency Management from Oklahoma State University and is now a Visiting Scholar and Affiliated Scholar with Indiana University South Bend, and an Affiliated Researcher with the Risk and Crisis Research Centre at MidSweden, University.

Bachelor’s and Masters from Bowling Green State University.  DRC 1981-1984 (PhD 1985) PhD in Sociology from The Ohio State University. 

He has conducted disaster research since 1978 and taught his first disaster class in 1979. He has also received funding for his research from the National Science Foundation, Department of Homeland Security, Federal Emergency Management Agency, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the American National Red Cross, and the Alabama Consortium on Higher Education among others.  

His academic publications can be found in such journals as International Journal of Mass Emergencies and Disasters, Natural Hazards, Journal of Emergency Management, Disaster Prevention and Management, International Journal of Risk Reduction, Sociological Focus, and Sociologiska Forsking among others.  

He has taught in emergency and disaster management degree programs since 1989. In 2015, he received the Blanchard Award for Excellence in Emergency Management Education.

Prof Andrea Gaynor is an environmental historian and ARC Future Fellow at the University of Western Australia, where she is researching histories of urban wild nature. She is vice-president of the European Society for Environmental History and a convenor of the Beeliar Group of Professors for Environmental Responsibility.

Prof Katie Holmes is an environmental historian teaching at La Trobe University in Melbourne and is Director of the Centre for the Study of the Inland. She writes on agricultural history and is currently working on two separate projects, one on drought and one on water. She also works in gender and oral history. 

https://scholars.latrobe.edu.au/kbholmes

Dr Ruth Morgan teaches at the Australian National University, where she is the Director of the Centre for Environmental History. She is writing an international history of climate change, under contract with Bloomsbury, and she is a Lead Author in Working Group II of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Sixth Assessment Report.

https://researchers.anu.edu.au/researchers/morgan-r

Dr. Nagi M. Shafik is a medical doctor with postgraduate degree in Public Health working as a researcher with the Korea Health Policy Project at Harvard Medical School. He has more than 35 years’ experience in both clinical and public health in Egypt, Algeria, Yemen, Cambodia, DPR Korea, India, Indonesia and Thailand. For more than 30 years, he worked overseas with different organizations: UNDP, Health Net International, Medecins Sans Frontiers, The World Health Organization and UNICEF. From 2001 to 2019, he worked intermittently in DPR Korea for UNICEF and the WHO.  In 2017, 2018 and 2019, he took three assignments with UNICEF DPRK to conduct field monitoring visits.

Yoonhee Ryder is a research assistant for the Korea Health Policy Project at Harvard Medical School. She is a medical student at the University of Michigan Medical School and is currently earning a master’s degree in Clinical Research through the Michigan School of Public Health. She is a former recipient of the State Department’s Critical Language Scholarship to study Korean at Yonsei University, Wonju Campus. Before medical school, Yoonhee served as a Peace Corps health volunteer in Togo, West Africa, and is passionate about global health and global surgery.

Dr. Kee B. Park is the Director of the Korea Health Policy Project at Harvard Medical School where he studies the geopolitical factors influencing health in North Korea and the relationships between international security, health, and human rights and health diplomacy. Since 2007, he has visited North Korea over 20 times to work alongside North Korean doctors as well as to support country driven health system strengthening efforts. His last visit was in November 2019. He is a member of the National Committee on North Korea and the Council of Korean Americans. He received his MD from Rutgers Medical School and MPH from Harvard Chan School of Public Health.

Tridibesh Dey is a final-year PhD candidate in the Anthropology of Science and Technology at the University of Exeter. His broader research themes involve plastics, process, technologies of plastic waste management, and infrastructures. His thesis, due for submission this year, is a careful ethnographic study of the different processes of plastic and practical networks, including informal recycling and a combustion-based large-scale national infrastructure of solid waste management being developed in India. Conceptually, it examines mutability as a tool to study plastic's complex ubiquity.

Geoffrey Hughes is a lecturer in anthropology at the University of Exeter and Associate Editor of the Journal of Legal Anthropology. His work explores how people in the contemporary Middle East are responding to new technologies for large-scale population management. He has written a number of articles on various social engineering projects in Jordan. His new book is entitled, Kinship, Islam and the Politics of Marriage in Jordan: Affection and Mercy. 

Dr. Lindsay M. Chervinsky is a Senior Fellow at the Center for Presidential History at Southern Methodist University, and the Kundrun Open-Rank Fellow at the International Center for Jefferson Studies, and a Professorial Lecturer at the School of Media and Public Affairs at George Washington University. She received her B.A. with honors in history and political science from George Washington University, her masters and Ph.D. from the University of California, Davis, and her postdoctoral fellowship from Southern Methodist University. Previously Dr. Chervinsky worked as a historian at the White House Historical Association. Her writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Ms. Magazine, The Daily Beast, The Bulwark, Time Magazine, USA Today, CNN, and the Washington Post. Dr. Chervinsky is the author of the award-winning book, The Cabinet: George Washington and the Creation of an American Institution.

Yiyun Kang received her BFA in painting from Seoul National University, MFA from UCLA’s Design & Media Arts, and PhD from Royal College of Art, UK. She held exhibitions at numerous art institutions including the Seoul Museum of Art, Taipei MOCA, Victoria and Albert Museum, and participated in international events such as Venice Architecture Biennale, Shenzhen Biennale, and Gwangju Design Biennale. In 2020, she participated in the transcontinental contemporary art project CONNECT, BTS as the only Korean artist; in 2017, she received the Red Dot Award with Deep Surface, a commissioned exhibition by Max Mara. Recently Kang had solo exhibition ‘Anthropause’ at PKM gallery, Seoul.

Currently a visiting lecturer at the Royal College of Art (London), Kang also gives lectures at Politecnico di Milano (Milano, Italy), SOAS University of London (London, UK), and Sotheby’s Institute of Art (London, UK). Kang is featured in Bloomberg’s ‘Art+Technology’ series and her writings have been published in the Leonardo Journal (MIT Press) and Practices of Projections, published by Oxford University Press. Kang is a fellow of the RSA (Royal Society of Arts, UK) since 2019.

Rosalind Williams taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1982 to her retirement in 2018. In 2001 she joined MIT’s Program in Science, Technology, and Society, serving as program head from 2002-06. Her main scholarly affiliation is the Society for the History of Technology (SHOT), of which she served as president in 2005-06, and from which she received its highest award, the Leonardo da Vinci Prize, in 2013. 

Her first three books (Dream Worlds, Notes from the Underground, Retooling) address this question: what are the implications for human life, both individual and collective, when we live in a predominantly self-constructed world?  In responding to it, she has studied the emergence of consumer culture in late l9th century France; in the creation of underworlds, both imagined and actual, as models of a technological environment; and the retooling of MIT as the Institute confronts the effects of an information age of which it has been a prime generator.  

Her most recent book, The Triumph of Human Empire (University of Chicago Press, 2013) examines the works and lives of three well-known writers (Jules Verne, William Morris, and Robert Louis Stevenson) to illuminate the event of consciousness at the end of the l9th century, when humans realized that they were close to mapping the entire globe and that the global frontier was closing.

Dana R. Fisher is a Professor in the Sociology Department at the University of Maryland. Her research focuses on questions related to democracy, activism, and climate politics.  Recent projects include a study of responses to climate change by political elites in the US, the emergence of the Civilian Climate Corps, and activism and protest around a range of issues.  Professor Fisher has authored over sixty-five research papers and book chapters and has written six books.  Her most recent book is American Resistance (Columbia University Press 2019). She currently serves as a Contributing Author for Working Group 3 of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's Sixth Assessment Review (IPCC AR6) writing about citizen engagement and civic activism.. She is also a Nonresident Senior Fellow with the Governance Studies program at The Brookings Institution.

Dr. Peter Poullos is Clinical Associate Professor of Radiology and Gastroenterology at the Stanford University School of Medicine. In 2003, as a G.I. fellow at UC San Francisco, he suffered a spinal cord injury and subsequently re-trained in radiology.  His specialty is body imaging, focusing on CT, MRI, and ultrasound of gastrointestinal diseases.  He is the Founder and Cochair of the Stanford Medicine Abilities Coalition. He is a member of the School of Medicine Faculty Senate and the Stanford Medicine Diversity Cabinet.  His work focuses on advocacy, education, and health equity for those with disabilities. He is the cohost of the Docs With Disabilities Podcast.

Rebecca Martinson is a nurse teaching intro to nursing and Anateomy and Physiology to high school students for 10 years-  it is her 11th year teaching. She wrote an oped for the New York Times last summer critical of the planning going into covid safety related to schools. During the past year in addition to teaching she has volunteered at several mass vaccination clinics as a draw nurse and vaccinator. Her area is seeing its largest surge ever in Covid19 cases and hospitalizations however under her governors order she is returning full time in person to the classroom on September 1. 

Mrs. Angela Minor has been teaching high school students since 1995. She currently teaches AP Government, Current World Issues and issues and Advocacy: Class, Race and Gender in America in lower Bucks County, Pennsylvania. She also teaches graduate classes through The Regional Training Center which partners with LaSalle University and the College of New Jersey. 

Kristina Buhrman is currently an assistant professor in the Department of Religion at Florida State University. Her research focuses on the history of knowledge in and about premodern Japan, covering topics from divination and astrology to disasters. She has been a member of the Teach 3.11 collective since 2011, and is currently an editor for the site.

Alex Jania is a PhD Candidate in the Department of History at University of Chicago focusing on Modern Japan. He is currently writing a dissertation on post-disaster memorialization in 20th and 21st century Japan and its place in global memory culture. Alex’s scholarship is part of a larger commitment to share the stories of Japanese disaster survivors for English speaking audiences. In particular, he has been involved in public history efforts like Humans of Minamisanriku and the Osaka Committee of Chicago Sister Cities International’s Kizuna Project, which both focus on the stories of 3/11 survivors in the Tōhoku region.

Peter Redfield is Professor of Anthropology and Erburu Chair in Ethics, Globalization and Development at the University of Southern California.  Trained as a cultural anthropologist sympathetic to history, he concentrates on circulations of science, technology and medicine in colonial and postcolonial contexts. The author of Life in Crisis: The Ethical Journey of Doctors Without Borders (University of California Press 2013) and Space in the Tropics: From Convicts to Rockets in French Guiana (University of California Press 2000), he is also coeditor of Forces of Compassion:  Humanitarianism between Ethics and Politics (SAR Press 2011), and an issue of the journal Limn (2018) on the theme of “Little Development Devices and Humanitarian Goods.”  He has held fellowships at the School for Advanced Research in Santa Fe and the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, in addition to serving as President of the Society for Cultural Anthropology.   

Today I will talk with Trevor Nelson and Tara Krebbs. Both are  parents and activists in Arizona, the state I grew up in, and where my father passed away last June.

Trevor Nelson is a parent of 4 school aged children, former science teacher, and community organizer with Right2SafeSchoolsAZ.org.

Tara Krebbs is the COVID Justice Leader for the Marked By COVID Arizona chapter. She joined the group after losing her Dad, Charles Henry Krebbs of Phoenix, Ariz died of COVID-19 last summer. She is a parent of a high school senior, Scotty.

Esther Liberman Cuenca is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Houston-Victoria, in Victoria, TX. She teaches courses in World, European, American, and Medieval History, and has published widely on pedagogy. She recently edited a special cluster of essays for the journal EuropeNow, which is published by the Council of European Studies at Columbia University, on teaching medieval history in the COVID era.

Ashley Shew is an associate professor of Science, Technology, and Society at Virginia Tech. Her current work, as part of a National Science Foundation CAREER grant, examines narratives disabled people share about technology, that are often different from dominant ways of thinking about disability tech. She is co-editor of three edited volumes in philosophy of technology, current co-editor-in-chief of Techné (the journal of the Society for Philosophy and Technology), and author of Animal Constructions and Technological Knowledge (2017). She works alongside other disabled people on issues of disability rights, inclusion, and activism through her local center for independent living and through the campus group the Disability Alliance and Caucus. Her writing on disabled positionality, tech, and access has been featured within the past 18 months in Nature, AAUP's Academé, and Inside Higher Ed. She is a proud signatory of the Accessible Campus Action Alliance's Statement on "Beyond High Risk," that advises universities in colleges to enact "a new, accessible normal" as pandemic planning continues. 

Cecília Tomori is Associate Professor and Director of Global Public Health and Community Health at the Johns Hopkins School of Nursing, with a joint appointment at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. She is a Hungarian-American anthropologist and public health scholar whose work addresses the structural and sociocultural drivers that shape patterns of health and illness. Dr. Tomori has collaborated with colleagues at Johns Hopkins and beyond on breastfeeding, infant sleep, and infectious disease prevention. She has authored three books on breastfeeding and reproduction, and numerous publications on a range of public health issues, including the COVID-19 pandemic.

Sungeun Kim is a PhD candidate at the graduate school of science and technology policy in KAIST. His research interest focuses on the relationship between environmental knowledge, nation-states, and spatial order in East Asia. His dissertation project examines the role of environmental sciences in the making of territorial claims and national identities.

Heewon Kim is a PhD candidate at the graduate school of Science and technology policy in KAIST. She is interested in the entanglement between the knowledge of the human mind and body, technology, and politics.  Her dissertation project examines the history of the sciences of non-verbal communication and the development facial expression recognition technology in the US since the 1960s.

Throughout her career, Alma has testified during countless legislative hearings, spearheaded numerous advocacy campaigns, and addressed social and political determinants of health in a manner that boldly places the needs of disparate populations at the forefront of Louisiana's political and social agenda. Alma's tireless civic engagement and uncanny ability to engage community stakeholders at the grassroots level have earned recognition on national, state, and local stages. One of her most noteworthy accomplishments was organizing and leading the Campaign for Healthcare for Everyone – Louisiana to advocate for Medicaid expansion closing the coverage gap for over 500,000 adults.

Deborah Streahle is a historian of medicine, technology, and care in American life. I am pursuing a PhD in history at Yale University. Her current research investigates alternative end-of-life and death care since 1960.

Adia Benton is a cultural anthropologist at Northwestern University with interests in global health, biomedicine, development/humanitarianism and professional sports.

She writes frequently on her blog, ethnography911.org, and on twitter (as ethnography911), connecting these issues with broader conversations about political economy, race and gender.

Her first book, HIV Exceptionalism: Development through Disease in Sierra Leone (University of Minnesota, 2015), explores the treatment of AIDS as an exceptional disease and the recognition and care that this takes away from other diseases and public health challenges in poor countries.

Her second book, The Fever Archive, is under contract with the University of Minnesota Press. It is a series of essays about the 2014-16 West African Ebola epidemic, focusing on the militarization of public health response, US biosecurity and the global war on terror, and what I have called the “racial immuno-logics” of triage and the politics of care.

Colleen Hagerty is a freelance journalist telling narrative stories through video, print, and social mediums. Much of her work reflects how global communities are reckoning with our changing climate, social dynamics, technologies, and politics. You can find her bylines across BBC News outputs and on Vox, High Country News, US News & World Report, Business Insider, and others. She also has a weekly newsletter about disasters.

Sarah Miller is a Certified Emergency Manager (CEM) who is currently a consultant and the Interim Chair of the Homeland Security Emergency Management Program at Pierce College. She most recently served as the Emergency Management Coordinator for the 16 cities, one tribe, and one island of south King County, Washington. Previously, she was the Emergency Manager for the City of Auburn, Washington for 9 years. Her 30+ years of public service includes 12 years as a public safety dispatcher and 9 years as a search and rescue volunteer. She holds a Master of Public Administration degree in Emergency Management, is a graduate of the National Emergency Management Advanced Academy, and has completed doctoral work in homeland security, terrorism, and public policy. She is currently working on her PhD dissertation on technology in emergency management.

Luke Mayfield is currently the Fire Program Manager for Mystery Ranch Backpacks, the current Vice President of the Grassroots Wildland Firefighters, and an AD Firefighter in Region 1.

Previously, Luke spent 18 seasons with the United States Forest Service. Luke worked in 4 regions, 7 forests, and the majority of his career was spent on Interagency Hotshot Crews. Luke resigned in 2019 as an Assistant Hotshot Superintendent/Supervisory Forestry Technician.

Todd Meyers is a medical anthropologist whose work moves between ethnography, visual culture, and the history of medicine. He joined McGill University's Department of Social Studies of Medicine as the Marjorie Bronfman Chair in Social Studies of Medicine last year.  Before that he was at New York University's Shanghai campus, where he directed the Center for Society, Health, and Medicine.  He is the author and editor of several books, most recently "A Cultural History of Medicine in the Modern Age," which came out from Bloomsbury earlier this year, and "The Human Body in the Age of Catastrophe," which he wrote with the historian Stefanos Geroulanos, published by University of Chicago Press in 2018.  His new ethnography, which deals with issues of loss and aftermath, "All That Was Not Her," will be published by Ducke University Press this coming February.

Associate Research Fellow, National Assembly Futures Institute, Republic of Korea. June was previously a postdoctoral fellow at Tufts University’s Center for Civic ScienceJune is a sociologist of science and technology, studying how social power interacts with science and technology. Previously, he studied science policy changes during the Trump administration based on laboratory ethnography. Currently, June is investigating how COVID-19 is shaping discourses on science and democracy in South Korea and the United States.

Yeongjun Yeo, Associate Research Fellow, National Assembly Futures Institute Republic of Korea. Yeongjun received his Ph.D. from the Technology Management, Economics and Policy Program (TEMEP) of Seoul National University in 2019 (Ph.D. Dissertation title:  Essays on Innovation, Human Capital, and Economic Growth in a Knowledge-based Economy : Computable General Equilibrium Modelling for Innovation Policy Assessment). He joined NAFI in July 2019, and is now conducting research on future-oriented innovation-driven growth strategies.  His recent research interests include innovation and industrial policy, innovation driven growth, innovation economics and policy impact assessments. Currently, Yeongjun is sketching a wide range of possible scenarios for the COVID-19 economy (w/ COVID era), which would set the Korean economy on different courses in the recovery period. Based on future scenarios, he is exploring the national strategies (policy options) to adapt to a number of changes brought about by the COVID-19.

Nisha Patel is an award-winning queer and disabled artist. She was the City of Edmonton’s 8th Poet Laureate, and the 2019 Canadian Individual Slam Champion. She is a recipient of the Edmonton Artists’ Trust Fund Award and the University of Alberta Alumni Award of Excellence. Her debut collection COCONUT is available now at Glass Bookshop. You can find her at nishapatel.ca.

Dr. Esther Chernak.  Esther  is a professor in the Department of Environmental Health, Drexel University School of Public Health, and has a position in the Drexel University College of Medicine. She is the director of the Center for Public Health Readiness and Communication at Drexel. Prior to joining the Drexel faculty in 2010, Dr. Chernak worked at the Philadelphia Department of Public Health for over 25 years. She is a regular contributor to COVIDCalls.

Anna Muldoon is a co-author of COVID-19 Conspiracy Theories and currently focuses on conspiracy, misinformation, and apocalypticism around infectious disease outbreaks. She is a former Science Policy Advisor in the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response (ASPR) at the Department of Health and Human Services. While at ASPR, she focused on international public health systems, laboratory biosafety and biosecurity, science communication, and policy development for regulating genetically altered biological organisms. She has published peer-reviewed articles on biodefense history, U.S. implementation of nonproliferation treaties, and infectious disease surveillance systems. She holds a Masters in Public Health degree from George Washington University and is currently a Ph.D. student in the School for the Future of Innovation and Society at ASU. 

I want to offer my sincere gratitude to guest hosts Kim Fortun, James Adams, and Jacob Steere-Williams for producing and hosting some lively and insightful COVIDCalls discussions while I was away.  And, as always, nothing is possible without COVIDCalls superteam members Bucky Stanton and Shivani Patel.  Thank you all.

Today I discuss the many ethical dilemmas of COVID with my guest, bioethicist Arthur Caplan.

Arthur Caplan is the Drs. William F and Virginia Connolly Mitty Professor and founding head of the Division of Medical Ethics at NYU School of Medicine in New York City.

Dr. Caplan is the author or editor of thirty-five books and over 725 papers in peer reviewed journals. His most recent books are The Ethics of Sport, (Oxford University Press, 2016 with Brendan Parent) and Vaccination Ethics and Policy, (MIT Press, 2017 with Jason Schwartz).

He has served on a number of national and international committees including as the chair of the National Cancer Institute Biobanking Ethics Working Group, chair of the Advisory Committee to the United Nations on Human Cloning; chair of the Advisory Committee to the Department of Health and Human Services on Blood Safety and Availability. He has also served on the Presidential Advisory Committee on Gulf War Illnesses, and the special advisory committee to the International Olympic Committee on genetics and gene therapy.

Dr. Caplan is a regular commentator on bioethics and health care issues for WebMD/Medscape, for WGBH radio in Boston and WMNF public radio in Tampa. 

Dr. Caplan is the recipient of many awards and honors including the McGovern Medal of the American Medical Writers Association and the Franklin Award from the City of Philadelphia. He was a USA Today 2001 “Person of the Year and was described as one of the ten most influential people in science by Discover magazine in 2008.  And this only scratches the surface of his work!

Dr. Lakshmi Krishnan is a physician, medical humanities scholar, and cultural historian of medicine at Georgetown, where she is the Founding Faculty Director of the Medical Humanities Initiative. Her current research and forthcoming book, The Doctor and the Detective: A Cultural History of Diagnosis, contracted for publication with Johns Hopkins University Press, focuses on the histories of diagnosis and clinical reasoning, with broader relevance for physician professional identity formation, medical epistemology, and diagnostic bias and health equity. Lakshmi sent me the humble biography, so let me fawn on her work a little here. Not only was she a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University, where he got a DPhil in 19th century English literature, she then got an MD at Johns Hopkins and interned at Duke. Her work has appeared in The Lancet, Annals of Inernal Medicine, Literature and Medicine, Modern Languages Review, Victorian Literature and Culture, and Victorian Poetry.

My second guest is Dr. Lorenzo Servitje. He is an Associate Professor of Literature and Medicine at Lehigh University. He holds a dual appointment in the English Department and Health, Medicine, and Society Program. Lorenzo is the author of the newly published, and incredibly exciting book Medicine is War: The Martial Metaphor in Victorian-Literature and Culture, published this year by SUNY press. His work has appeared in the Journal of Medical Humanities, Critical Survey, Science Fiction Studies, Literature and Medicine, and Games and Culture. Lorenzo also serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Medical Humanities.

Dr Mandisa Mbali joined the Department of Historical Studies in 2017 from Stellenbosch University, where she taught Social Anthropology. She obtained her doctoral degree in Modern History at Oxford University.  Her main research interest is in health policy and activism, considered historically, as interrelated phenomena, both transnationally and within South Africa. Dr Mbali has explored this theme in book chapters and journal articles on AIDS activism and policies, health, gender and sexuality and the politics of race and ethics in international health.  In 2013 she published her scholarly monograph South African AIDS Activism and Global Health Politics with Palgrave Macmillan as part of their Global Ethics series: this monograph was completed during postdoctoral fellowships at Yale University and the University of KwaZulu-Natal.  More recently, her work has analysed transnational debates over apartheid and medical humanitarianism in late twentieth century South Africa.  She is also working towards developing a comparative historical approach to examining the global health politics of AIDS and COVID-19. 

Dr. Dora Vargha is Professor of History and Medical Humanities at the University of Exeter in the UK. Dora’s expertise is on the  history of epidemics, the politics of health, and Cold War history. Dr. Vargha’s interests span from the politics of epidemic management to public health systems and access to therapeutics. Her book, Polio Across the Iron Curtain: Hungary's Cold War with an Epidemic was published open access in 2018 with Cambridge University Press. She has also written on the global infrastructure of diphtheria antitoxin, the politics of vaccination in Eastern Europe, hospital care of disabled children in communist cotexts, and about shifting epidemic narratives in historical analysis. Dr. Vargha is currently working on a couple of different research projects, After the End of Disease, which pushes back on conventional narratives of epidemic bell-curves, and a second project, Socialist Medicine: An Alternative Global health History. Dora is also co-editor of the journal Social History of Medicine.

Dr. Jim Downs is the Gilder Lehrman NEH Chair of Civil War Era Studies and History at Gettysburg College. He is the author of two widely-acclaimed books, Sick From Freedom: African American Sickness and Suffering during the Civil War and Reconstruction, published Oxford University Press in 2012, and Stand By Me: the Forgotten History of Gay Liberation, published with Basic Books in 2016. In herculean fashion Jim has also edited for anthologies and dozens of articles, essays, and op-eds, and regularly appears in The Atlantic, The New Yorker, Slate, The New York Times, the Chronicle of Higher Education, and the LA Review of Books. He is the co-series editor with Catherine Clinton of History in the Headlines. His forthcoming book, Maladies of Empire: How Slavery, Colonialism, and War Transformed Medicine, is due out soon with Harvard University Press- you can now pre-order your own copy, which I highly suggest you do. Maladies of Empire is a pathbreaking project on the global origins and entanglements of epidemiology with colonialism, race, and warfare in the 18th and 19th centuries.

Dr. Lukas Engelman is a Chancellor’s Fellow and Senior Lecturer of History and Biomedicine at the University of Edinburgh. He is a history of medicine and epidemiology, and has worked extensively on the history of HIV/AIDS and the Third Plague Pandemic. His current project, funded by a four-year ERC grant, is titled “The Epidemiological Revolution: A History of Epidemiological Reasoning in the Twentieth Century. You can find the project website by googling “The Epidemy,” and the active Twitter handle @EpidemyERC. Lukas is the author of two books, Mapping AIDS, with Cambridge University Press, in 2018, and, co-authored with Christos Lynteris (who appeared on COVID-Calls with Scott and Graham Mooney on September 8th, 2020), Sulphuric Utopias, published in 2020 with MIT. Sulphuric Utopias, an incredible book that I highly recommended examines the history of fumigation and maritime sanitation, was recently listed by The Guardian as one of 30 books to read to understand the world in 2020.

Priyanka deSouza graduated last spring from MIT’s Department of Urban Planning and is now an assistant professor in the Department of Urban and Regional Planning at the University of Denver.  Her research examines different ways of understanding air pollution and its effects.  Priynaka has worked with a diverse array of organizations, including community groups, Harvard School of Public Health, NASA and the World Health Organization. A recent publication examines PM 2.5 levels in Nairobi before and during the COVID-19 curfew, highlighting implications for environmental justice (https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/2515-7620/ac1214/meta). 

Gaige Kerr is a research scientist in the Department of Environmental and Occupational Health at George Washington University. His research has examined chemical transport models and the meteorology responsible for ozone and particulate pollution.  He’s also used satellite data to explore the inequalities of pollution distribution and exposure. An  important goal is to understand the meteorological- and emissions-driven variability of surface-level air pollutants. A recent publication analyzes  15 largest metropolitan areas in the United States to see how the drop in air pollution during the COVID-19 pandemic differed from neighborhood to neighborhood. 

(​​https://www.nasa.gov/feature/esnt/2021/qa-scientists-analyze-how-the-pandemic-affected-air-quality)

Alison Motsinger-Reif  is Chief of and a principal investigator in the Biostatistics and Computational Biology Branch at the US National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences.  Her research focuses on the development and application of modern statistical approaches for understanding the etiology of common, complex diseases. 

David Reif is a professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at North Carolina State University, where his research focuses on complex interactions between human health and the environment using bioinformatics and statistical methods, visual analytics, experimental design, and software for the integrated analysis of high-dimensional, multi-scale data from diverse sources. .

Lori Peek is professor in the Department of Sociology and director of the Natural Hazards Center at the University of Colorado Boulder. She also directs the NSF-funded CONVERGE facility,  which is dedicated to advancing convergence research for the hazards and disaster field. She studies vulnerable populations in disaster and is author of Behind the Backlash: Muslim Americans after 9/11, co-editor of Displaced: Life in the Katrina Diaspora, and co-author of Children of Katrina. 

Lori Peek is professor in the Department of Sociology and director of the Natural Hazards Center at the University of Colorado Boulder. She also directs the NSF-funded CONVERGE facility,  which is dedicated to advancing convergence research for the hazards and disaster field. She studies vulnerable populations in disaster and is author of Behind the Backlash: Muslim Americans after 9/11, co-editor of Displaced: Life in the Katrina Diaspora, and co-author of Children of Katrina. 

Shor Salkas (they/them) is one of the two LGBTQIA Community Liaisons to the COVID-19 Response at the Minnesota Department of Health (MDH). Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic Shor has been working with their colleagues to get as much timely and accurate information into LGBTQIA communities as possible through connecting with community members, organizations, and hosting community gatherings. Their other work at MDH is to provide coaching, training, and technical assistance to Statewide Health Improvement Program (SHIP) partners across the state of Minnesota to dig deeper and enact health equity and community engagement as core principles of their work. Shor is deeply committed to health equity and health justice as ways to create more healed and thriving communities. Beyond their work at MDH Shor has been working to support LGBTQIA communities through many projects and organizations like the Minnesota Transgender Health Coalition, Out in the Backyard, SHIFT Minnesota, the City of Minneapolis Transgender Equity Council, and through public health and health equity coalition building across Minnesota and Wisconsin.

Mattie Laidlaw (she/they) is an LGBTQ Community Liaison for the COVID-19 Response at the Minnesota Department of Health. In this role, she elevates the concerns and needs of the LGBTQ community, shares up-to-date information, and resources about all things COVID-19 with the community, and advocates for internal change at the Minnesota Department of Health to better serve LGBTQ Minnesotans.

Marylouise McLaws is a Professor of Epidemiology, Hospital Infection and Infectious Diseases Control at the University of New South Wales, Sydney Australia.  

She is a member of the World Health Organization Infection Prevention and Control group for COVID-19.

Martha Lincoln is Assistant Professor in the Anthropology Department at San Francisco State University. A medical and cultural anthropologist, she has commented on the social and cultural dynamics of the COVID-19 pandemic frequently over the past year, including in opinion essays in Nature and The Hill. 

Tanya Corbin (Ph.D. Political Science), is a disaster policy scholar and Department Chair of Security and Emergency Services at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University Worldwide. Before pursuing an academic career, she worked in policy, non-profit, and business, including as a small business owner. This experience informs her academic work, where she aims to co-create knowledge with applied value to inform public policy and support practitioners through research and innovative academic program development. Her current research agenda includes a comparative project examining policy change after the 2017 hurricane season and governmental policy responses to COVID-19. She is Co-lead for the NSF CONVERGE Covid-19 Emergency Management Working Group with Dr. Samantha Montano.

Summer Marion is Incoming Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Maryland School of Public Policy and PhD Candidate in Political Science at Northeastern University. She holds additional affiliations as a Research Fellow with the Pandemics and Borders Project, Research Associate with the Center for International and Security Studies at Maryland, and Visiting Researcher with Harvard Humanitarian Initiative under the T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Summer's research focuses on global governance, international organizations, health security, and philanthropy. She is currently working on a projects examining the role of private foundations in outbreak preparedness, prevention, and response, as well as the border politics of global outbreaks. 

Filip Vostel is senior researcher at the Centre for Science, Technology, and Society Studies at the Institute of Philosophy of the Czech Academy of Sciences. He has been working on synthesizing several streams within STS (e.g. lab studies, ANT) with social studies of time. In his current research he explores time and temporality in big science and how various time layers - and their interminglings - co-shape knowledge (and knowledge production). Currently he is writing a book investigating the multiplicity of speeds/accelerations in socio-technical domains and human lives broadly conceived (The Speed Complex: The Socio-Technical and Human Dimensions - to be published with Bristol University Press in 2023). He teaches STS at Charles University in Prague and serves as the Secretary at the European Association for the Study of Science and Technology (EASST). 

Clark Miller is Professor and Director of the Center for Energy and Society in the School for the Future of Innovation in Society and the Global Futures Laboratory at Arizona State University

Dr. Micah Pollak is an associate professor of economics and the director of the Center for Economic Education and Research in the School of Business and Economics at Indiana University Northwest in Gary, Indiana. His research interests cover a wide range of topics, including data analytics, applied microeconomics, health economics (especially in the context of Covid-19), financial economics, regional economics and more. Dr. Pollak earned his Ph.D. in economics from the University of Illinois in 2011. He teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in the areas of microeconomics, economic history and other topics.

Sharon Weinberger is the Washington Bureau Chief of Yahoo News and the author of The Imagineers of War: The Untold Story of DARPA, the Pentagon Agency That Changed the World, published by Knopf. She has held  fellowships at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, MIT’s Knight Science Journalism program, the International Reporting Program at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, and Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism. She has written on military science and technology for the New York Times, the Washington Post, Foreign Policy Magazine, the Financial Times, Wired magazine, Nature, BBC, Discover, and Slate, among other publications. 

Hye-yeong Jang serves currently as a national assembly member of the 21st Parliament in South Korea—she is a member of the Justice Party and serves as chairman of policy.

She is active in parliamentary politics especially working as a chief author of several pieces of legislation such as an Anti Discrimination Law, Deinstitutionalization Support Law, and a  Law for Protection of the rights of people with disabilities. Before working as an elected official in Justice Party, Jang directed a documentary film "Grown Up” in 2018 to show her younger sister’s life in the local community after leaving a residential facility for people with disabilities. She has also been running her own youtube channel "serious sister" to explore disability rights, minority issues, and feminism.  Her activities have been acknowledged by numerous awards such as the Korean Human Rights Award for People with Disabilities, the YWCA Korean Female Leader Award - Young Leader Award. Recently in February 2021, she has been nominated to TIME 100, the only Korean among the nominees.

I’d also like to acknowledge our translator today Hyunah Keum, a masters student in the Graduate School of Science and Technology Policy at KAIST—she is studying the environmental impacts of COVID. 

Cassie Alexander is a registered nurse of fourteen years -- burn, critical care transport, and ICU -- and a paranormal romance author. Her most recent novel is Year of the Nurse (https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B095PWYG3B/ forthcoming late July), about her experiences working in a COVID ward in 2020. 

Dr. Sonali Vaid is a medical doctor with a Master’s in public health from the Harvard School of Public Health. For over a decade she has worked to improve the quality and safety of healthcare. Her work has spanned several countries in Asia and Africa. She has consulted for international organizations such as WHO and UNICEF. She supports teams of health workers in improving their healthcare services.  Some areas of care she has helped improve include - maternal and neonatal health, injection safety, infection control, emergency care, surgical safety, health worker safety etc.

Dr Vaid is also currently an Aspen New Voices Fellow; this is a year-long program that provides media and advocacy training for frontline development experts. She is based in India & is speaking to us from the small and beautiful small town of Bir in the north Indian state of Himachal Pradesh.

Sari Altschuler is associate professor of English and founding director of Health, Humanities, and Society at Northeastern University. Her work has appeared in leading journals, including American Literature, American Literary History, PMLA, and the medical journal Lancet. She is the author of The Medical Imagination: Literature and Health in the Early United States (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018) and co-editor of Keywords for Health Humanities (under contract with NYU Press).

Hi I’m Eleanor Mayes, I currently serve as a production assistant and transcription director for COVIDCalls. I recently completed my masters in materials science and engineering at the University of Minnesota this past semester, and previously attended the university of Chicago for my undergraduate degree. I will attend UC Berkeley this fall, in their new Master’s of Design program.  In my spare time I enjoy reading about typography, disability studies, LGBTQ+ activism, and the history of science.

You can hear COVIDCalls anytime recorded as podcasts on spotify, iTunes, podbean or anywhere you get podcasts.

Stewart Landers, JD, MCP, is a Senior Consultant at John Snow, Inc. with over 30 years of

experience working on public health systems and practice related to chronic disease, wellness,

HIV/AIDS, mental health/substance abuse treatment, LGBTQ health, emergency preparedness, and immunization. Mr. Landers conducted two of the first large scale LGBTQ health needs assessments in Santa Clara County, CA and the state of Rhode Island.

Mr. Landers is an associate editor for the American Journal of Public Health (AJPH) focused on LGBTQ health, including HIV and chronic disease prevention and control. He is currently curating a collection of articles on “COVID-19 and the LGBTQ Community.” He has published in a wide variety of journals including the New England Journal of Medicine, the Journal of the American Medical Association, as well as AJPH. Stewart served on the Massachusetts Commission on LGBTQ Youth from 2010-2018.

Before I get started with Kiheung Kim, I wanted to take a moment to acknowledge that today marks the 300th episode of COVIDCalls.  When I started doing COVIDCalls in March of 2020 it was a resource for daily discussion when information about how to react to the pandemic was literally evolving minute by minute.  To me the urgency of the daily calls was about getting disaster experts into conversation about their research, and getting their expertise into the news cycle.  Over time the project became a site of exploration—a place (among many) where the widest variety of experts/survivors/witnesses could be in dialogue (I was lucky to be on the mic with them).  Everyday we have been trying to make sense of the pandemic, and trying to also make sense of the tools we have to create and sustain this knowledge. 

Over the past couple of months—especially as the pandemic has moved into its next act in North America, I’ve noticed a shift.  Not that the search for knowing COVID is by any means at an end, but rather that people are turning to COVIDCalls as a way to take stock of what happened over the past 18 months.  I should say, for guests who are expert in Brazil or India, or here where I am in S. Korea—this is not yet time for a post action report or a eulogy—COVID is still a very serious daily threat to life.  Still, there is among many a sense of passage—a movement out of one life and into another.  For me that means waiting for a vaccination—but the wait isn’t endless—I see it on a calendar.

I have heard people say that they are eager just to forget and move on—I even had one person chastise me on Twitter for wanting to linger with the memory of COVID, almost as if I’ve made a choice to reside in the darkness of it.  I’ve thought about that a lot—and you know what maybe there is a truth there—even when my own daily risk goes down through vaccination (not yet!) I know I will want to reside in this space of uncertainty and concern a while longer—this is a place of vigilance, and of action, and I worry that I will—that society will—move to closure and forgetting before the power of the uncertainty and fear provokes us to act.  And act we must—we have so much to do for our health systems, our struggles for justice, our schools, our care workers—COVID shows the need for reform at every turn.  So let’s get vaccinated and live, but let’s not let go of this feeling of—what else can I call it—fear, of deep concern—until we’ve done what we can do for a safer future. 

Disaster Memory is not apolitical, it is not uncritical, it is not behind glass at a museum——memory can provoke—and the future of COVID memory is literally being made right now—we are making it. The memory of COVID is already a battleground of competing explanations and ideologies—not all of them in good faith, and some of them very dangerous.

It’s not a choice to remember or forget COVID.  It’s a choice among competing narratives, competing memories.  Don’t let anyone tell you it wasn’t that bad—or that those many months were all bad or wasted—it wasn’t one thing or another.  COVID was, and is, as diverse as life and society itself.  COVID forced us to create new practices of work and sociability, even some new ways of living—some attention to the brokenness of the old ways--that we might not want to give up so quickly.  That’s good and useful.  But at the core there is also a struggle to learn hard lessons from it. Let’s work together to sustain the lessons based in the grim truth of unnecessary deaths, compassion for those still suffering, and a just recovery to come.

Let me thank Shivani Patel, Bucky Stanton, Hyunah Keum, and Eleanor Mayes.  AND let me tell you that in a few weeks time the CCalls research portal will launch—plus we have more guest hosts coming: including Kim Fortun, Jacob Steere-Williams, and Kristin Urquiza (thanks Felicia Henry).  Stay tuned.

Kiheung Kim is a professor at Postech (Pohang University of Science and Technology) in South Korea. He graduated from the sociology department at Sogang University and did his PhD at Science Studies Unit of the University of Edinburgh where he worked on the social studies of infectious diseases, in particular, mad cow disease (BSE, scrapie and vCJD). 

Kiheung worked at the Welcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at University College London and moved to do laboratory studies at the Chemical Engineering Department, Imperial College London.

He is interested in the social aspects of animal and human infectious diseases like Foot-and-Mouth Disease, MERS and Covid-19.

He published a book, "Social Construction of Disease: From Scrapie to Prions" (Routledge, 2007). 

Today I welcome Pastor Isaac Scott. Pastor Isaac Scott is an Award-Winning, Social Impact Multimedia Artist and Human Rights Activist. He is a Fellow at the Center for Institutional and Social Change at Columbia Law School and Founder & Lead-Artist for The Confined Arts at the Center for Justice at Columbia University, where he spearheads the promotion of justice reform through the transformative power of the arts. His research at Columbia investigates social and institutional methods of dehumanization in the carceral system to decrease punitive triggers in the US criminal justice system. Pastor Scott’s passion for equal human rights runs deep and comes as a result of being directly affected by the criminal justice system and its disenfranchising nature. Since returning to society in 2013, he's combined fine art, graphic design, and film & media to counter the existing negative narratives of people in prison and of those formerly incarcerated and directly impacted. Through The Confined Arts, Pastor Scott has organized art exhibitions, poetry performances, and storytelling projects to interrogate and bring about awareness around several important issues, such as juvenile justice, solitary confinement, prison conditions, the rising rate of women in prison and the media’s role in shaping public perception. As a result of the impactful work of The Confined Arts, Pastor Scott received the 2018, 2019, and 2020 Change Agent Award from the School of General Studies at Columbia University, where he currently studies Visual Arts and Human Rights as a Justice in Education Scholar. Today, Pastor Scott holds the esteemed title of Associate Pastor at God’s Touch Healing Ministry, located in East Harlem, NY, where he serves on Manhattan Community Board 11 on the nomination of City Council Bill Perkins. Pastor Isaac understands the healing power of the arts; it holds the power to transform both the artist and the audience. He also believes that art, in every form, can and does, effectively change perceptions and conquers stigma. Through his own lived experience, Pastor Scott personally understands the need for realistic representations of individuals, like himself, convicted of a crime in the past. Pastor Scott has dedicated his life to using his creativity, in every way possible, to continue educating and promoting change.

Today’s guest is Adam Rogers.  Adam writes about science for Wired Magazine. Before coming to WIRED, he was a Knight Science Journalism Fellow at MIT and a reporter for Newsweek. He is the author of the New York Times science bestseller Proof: The Science of Booze. NEW story up yesterday titled, An Old Source for Potential New Covid-19 Drugs: Blood Serum—great read.  We will talk about the COVID-19 test snafu, vaccines, silicon valley and the tech economy in the age of COVID-19 and more.

Dr Agnes Arnold-Forster is a historian of medicine, work, and the emotions. She is a postdoctoral researcher in the Social Studies of Medicine Department at McGill University, and has published on the history of cancer, surgery, and the emotions of healthcare labour.

Sam Schotland is a historian of medicine, emotions, and capitalism. He is pursuing an MD at the University of Michigan and a PhD in History of Science and Medicine at Yale University, and has published on the history of children's health and doctors' emotions.  

Prakash Kashwan is an Associate Professor of Political Science and Co-Director of the Research Program on Economic and Social Rights, Human Rights Institute, University of Connecticut, Storrs. He studies how social and political context shapes outcomes related to the environment, economic development, and social justice, with a specific focus on the role of political and economic inequalities. He is the author of the widely reviewed and acclaimed book Democracy in the Woods: Environmental Conservation and Social Justice in India, Tanzania, and Mexico (Oxford University Press, 2017) and a Co-Editor of the journal Environmental Politics. He currently finalizing an edited volume on Climate Justice in India to be published by Cambridge University Press, and another book manuscript on Rooted Radicalism, which focuses on Climate Justice in the global North and is under an advanced contract with Oxford University Press. 

My guest today! Emma Green is a staff writer at The Atlantic, where she covers politics, policy, and religion. In 2019, she won three first-place awards from the Religion News Association, and she was recently named the laureate of the 2020 George W. Hunt, S.J., Prize for Excellence in Journalism, Arts, & Letters. Emma has spoken at universities across the U.S., and her work has appeared in outlets including The New York Times, The Washington Post, and NPR. She lives in New York City.

Carlee Purdum, Ph.D., is an Assistant Research Professor at the Hazard Reduction and Recovery Center at Texas A&M University. Her work focuses on the impact that hazards and disasters have on prisons and incarcerated populations. She currently leads the CONVERGE COVID19 working group studying the impact of COVID19 in prisons. Her research partners include the organizations The Texas Prison Air-Conditioning Advocates (TPAA) and the Campaign to Fight Toxic Prisons who she works with to study the impact that extreme temperatures and COVID19 have had on prisons and incarcerated persons in Texas.

Today I welcome Sonal Jessel. Sonal Jessel is the Director of Policy at WE ACT for Environmental Justice. She is responsible for advancing the organization’s policy agenda at the local, state, and national levels, in addition to leading New York City policy initiatives and the Northern Manhattan Climate Action (NMCA) Plan. Prior to joining WE ACT, she conducted research in energy insecurity, housing, and public health at Columbia University, and coordinated clinical trials at Weill Cornell Medicine. With roots in California and Connecticut, Sonal has an MPH in Population and Family Health with a concentration in Climate and Health from Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, and a BA in Organismal Biology from Pitzer College, in California. Her interest is focused on the intersection of environmental and social justice, health, and policy.

Today I welcome medical Colleen Derkatch to discuss the rhetoric of biomedicine and medical expertises in the pandemic. Colleen Derkatch is Associate Professor of rhetoric in the Department of English.

Her research in rhetoric of health and medicine examines how language shapes and is shaped by various, often embodied, and sometimes conflicting forms of expertise about illness, treatment, and health. Her book, Bounding Biomedicine: Evidence and Rhetoric in the New Science of Alternative Medicine, external link (University of Chicago Press, 2016), examines how scientific research on alternative health practices constitutes the boundaries between what counts as safe, effective health care and what does not. Her current project is Why Wellness Sells: Natural Health in a Pharmaceutical Culture.

My guest today is Colleen Derkatch is Associate Professor of rhetoric in the Department of English.

Her research in rhetoric of health and medicine examines how language shapes and is shaped by various, often embodied, and sometimes conflicting forms of expertise about illness, treatment, and health. Her book, Bounding Biomedicine: Evidence and Rhetoric in the New Science of Alternative Medicine, external link (University of Chicago Press, 2016), examines how scientific research on alternative health practices constitutes the boundaries between what counts as safe, effective health care and what does not. Her current project is Why Wellness Sells: Natural Health in a Pharmaceutical Culture.

Travis Chi Wing Lau joined the Kenyon faculty in 2020 and is Assistant Professor of English. His research and teaching focuses on the intersections between literature and medicine and the longer histories of disability and pathology. Lau is currently working on a book manuscript entitled “Insecure Immunity: Inoculation and Anti-Vaccination, 1720-1898”, which explores the British cultural history of immunity and vaccination in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Alongside his scholarship, Lau frequently writes for venues of public scholarship like Synapsis: A Journal of Health Humanities, Public Books, and The Los Angeles Review of Books. His poetry has appeared in Barren Magazine, Wordgathering, Glass, The New Engagement and in two chapbooks.

For the next three Mondays of June, I will be your guest host! Exactly one year ago, Scott invited me to be a guest on the podcast to discuss disaster research, race, emergency management, and vulnerable communities. On that episode, I talked about the importance of redefining concepts like vulnerability and expanding how we understood the social construction of disasters. As a guest host, I’d like to continue that discussion by inviting guests to talk about structural violence, incarceration , and environmental injustice, incorporating my own background as a scholar-activist. One year after the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery, calls for racial and economic justice still resound across the country. It is my hope that we amplify these calls through these next few episodes.

Today I welcome Dr. Dan Berger, Associate Professor of Comparative Ethnic Studies at University of Washington Bothell. He is the author or editor of several books, including Captive Nation: Black Prison Organizing in the Civil Rights Era, which won the 2015 James Rawley Prize from the Organization of American Historians, and Rethinking the American Prison Movement, coauthored with Toussaint Losier. His most recent book is Remaking Radicalism: A Grassroots Documentary Reader of the United States, 1973-2001, coedited with Emily Hobson. Berger curates the Washington Prison History Project, an online archive of prison policy and organizing in Washington state, and has contributed articles to The Appeal, Black Perspectives, Boston Review, and Truthout, among elsewhere.

Bin Xu is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Emory University. His research interests lie at the intersection of politics and culture, including collective memory, civil society, cultural sociology, and social theory. He is the author of The Politics of Compassion: The Sichuan Earthquake and Civic Engagement in China (Stanford, 2017), which won the 2018 Best Book Prize for Culture and Honorable Mention for Asia from the American Sociological Association, and Chairman Mao's Children: Generation and the Politics of Memory in China (Cambridge, forthcoming in 2021). His articles have appeared in leading sociological and China studies journals. He is working on his third book The Culture of Democracy: A Sociological Approach to Civil Society (under contract with Polity Press, UK) and two ongoing projects pertaining to mourning, commemorations, and symbolic politics of the COVID-19 crisis.

Bernadette McBride has a Masters in Nursing from Gonzaga University and a Masters in Health Education from Whitworth University. She is a registered Nurse Practitioner in Washington State, specializing in geriatric family practice. Bernadette formerly the owner of adult family homes, Legacy Management and Tranquility Life Care in the Tri-Cities for 25 years. For her first Master’s degree, she focused on death and bereavement of parents who lost children to SIDS.

Dr. Sara K. McBride has a Ph.D. in Media Studies from Massey University.  Sara has a master’s degree in Public Administration from University of Hawai’i at Mānoa, with a concentration in Disaster Management and Humanitarian Assistance. She is currently a Mendenhall Fellow at the U.S. Geological Survey, studying the communication of aftershock forecasts and earthquake early warning. Sara also has served 16 years as a practitioner in emergency management. She was part of the New Zealand’s H1N1 response in 2009.

Jenny McConnell Frederick is a Washington, DC-based Director, Producer and strong believer in impossible theatre.  She's the co-Artistic Director of Rorschach Theatre which she founded in the summer of 1999 with Randy Baker. 

She has directed, produced and created theatre experiences for Theater J, University of Maryland, Catholic University and Word Dance Theatre.  Currently she is part of an 8-member team building Rorschach's ground-breaking Distance Frequencies, a project for which she created the concept.  The immersive experience sends participants to seven locations around Washington, DC to explore chapters in an unfolding story about DC history--real and imagined. The project culminates in a live show in July 2021.

Gabriel Bosslet is associate professor of clinical medicine at the Indiana University School of Medicine and is the Program Director for the Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine Fellowship.  Since the pandemic began, he has cared for COVID patients in the ICU and helped to deploy and educate critical care trainees through the two COVID surges in the state of Indiana.  He also runs a COVID Facebook information page for the state of Indiana known as the Hoosier COVID Update that has become a community of over 40,000 followers.

Ruth Carlitz, PhD, is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Tulane University, where she teaches courses on international development and African Politics. Her research focuses primarily on the politics of public goods provision in low-income countries, from the perspectives of both governments and citizens. Her work has been published in World Development, Perspectives on Politics, Public Administration, and other outlets. In addition to her academic research, she has worked on evaluations commissioned by USAID, the International Budget Partnership, DFID, and the World Bank.

Bob Huber is a longtime magazine editor and writer; his home base for the past 3 decades has been Philadelphia magazine, where he was features editor for a decade. Huber has written features for Esquire, GQ, Details and other national magazines, and has won many awards for his journalism; his work has been anthologized in Best American Legal Writing and Best American Sports Writing numerous times. Over the past two decades, his 80-plus features for Philadelphia magazine have provided a comprehensive window into the city’s movers and shakers; in 2006, he broke the Bill Cosby sexual-assault scandal.  

Currently Huber is writing a book with his 32-year-old son, Sam, who has Asperger’s, about life on the spectrum from the point of view of both father and son.

Dorit Rubinstein Reiss is a professor of law at the University of California, Hastings College of the Law. Increasingly, her research and activities are focused on legal issues related to vaccines, including exemption laws and tort liability related to non-vaccination. She has published law review and peer reviewed articles and many blog posts on legal issues related to vaccines. 

Ross D. Silverman, JD, MPH, is Professor of Health Policy and Management at the Indiana University Richard M. Fairbanks School of Public Health and Professor of Public Health and Law at the Indiana University Robert H. McKinney School of Law in Indianapolis. He serves as a member of the Covid-19 Vaccine Allocation advisory committee for the Indiana State Health Department, and is an Associate Editor for the journal Public Health Reports, the official journal of the U.S. Surgeon General and the U.S. Public Health Service.

Maya Goldenberg is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Guelph (pronounced Gwelf) in Canada. She works in philosophy of medicine and has a new book on vaccine hesitancy coming out in March 2021. _Vaccine Hesitancy: Public Trust, Expertise, and the War on Science’_ is published by University of Pittsburgh Press.

Tara Haelle is a freelance science journalist and photojournalist who serves as the AHCJ Core Topic Leader for Medical Studies. She particularly specializes in reporting on vaccines, pediatrics, maternal health, obesity, nutrition, mental health and medical research in general, and she regularly speaks on vaccine hesitancy. Her work has appeared in Elemental, Scientific American, New York Times, Forbes, Politico, Slate, NOVA, Wired and Science, and she writes and covers medical conferences regularly for Medscape and MDEdge.

Lori Smetanka is the Executive Director of the National Consumer Voice for Quality Long-Term Care, the leading national nonprofit advocacy organization representing consumers receiving long-term care and services in nursing homes, assisted living facilities, and home and community based settings. Lori has testified before Congress and served on federal task forces, technical expert panels, and working groups on long-term care issues.

From 2004 – 2016 she served as the Director of the National Long-Term Care Ombudsman Resource Center, providing technical assistance, training, and support to the 53 State and more than 570 local long-term care ombudsman programs across the country. She received a B.A. from Indiana University of Pennsylvania, and a J.D. from the University of Dayton School of Law.

Dr. Jasmine Travers is an Assistant Professor at New York University Rory Meyers College of Nursing. Her career is dedicated to designing and conducting research to improve health outcomes and reduce health disparities in vulnerable older adult groups using both quantitative and qualitative approaches. As a health services researcher, she has leveraged many datasets to investigate these issues and has published widely on the topics of aging, long-term care, health disparities, workforce issues, and infections. Prior to joining the faculty at NYU, Dr. Travers completed a postdoctoral fellowship with the National Clinician Scholars Program at Yale University and a T32 funded postdoctoral fellowship at the New Courtland Center for Transitions and Health at the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing. She completed her doctoral training in health services research with a specialization in gerontology at Columbia University School of Nursing.

Rebecca A. Adelman is professor and chair of Media and Communication Studies at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.  She is the author of Beyond the Checkpoint: Visual Practices in America's Global War on Terror (2014) and Figuring Violence: Affective Investments in Perpetual War (2019), as well as co-editor of Remote Warfare: New Cultures of Violence (2020).  In April 2020, she launched Coronavirus Lost and Found (pandemicarchive.com), a public archive where anyone can log anything they've lost or found as a result of the pandemic.  

Ondine Sherwood is an IT professional with an interest in health.  She caught what she assumes was Covid-19 at the end of March 2020 (never tested at the time) and although the symptoms were relatively mild she developed Long Covid.  She thought on many occasions that I had recovered but the symptoms kept returning, especially after exertion, work or stress.  She is a co-founder of LONG COVID SOS.

Vicky van der Togt is the founder of the Zero Covid Alliance, co-founder of the Dutch human rights organisation Containment Nu Netherlands and member of Long Covid Nederland (PASC). She has been advocating for recognition, research and treatment for Long Covid in the Netherlands since July last year, and has run multiple (international) campaigns focused on this and many other topics regarding the coronavirus pandemic.

Orchid Allicock is a postdoctoral research associate at Yale School of Public Health with Drs. Nathan Grubaugh and Daniel Weinberger. Previously she received postdoctoral training at the Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University, where she gained an interest in translational science and diagnostic development. Currently she works on development and optimization of saliva-based diagnostics with SalivaDirect.

Steph Tan is a Research Assistant and an incoming Master of Public Health student at the Yale School of Public Health, concentrating in Social and Behavioral Sciences. She is also a Cornell University alum. Last year, Steph pushed for COVID-19 saliva testing in her home country of New Zealand where she is currently based. Alongside head researcher Dr. Anne Wyllie, she is now facilitating the implementation of it by collaborating with New Zealand government leaders. 

Dr. Anne Wyllie is an associate research scientist in epidemiology at Yale University.  She is credited with pushing forward on the use of saliva as a superior sample for creating high-quality low-cost SARS-CoV-2 testing. Her paper on the subject attracted support by the NBA that led to the development of technology that has enabled others to make possible frequent testing keeping kids in school and enabling professional sports to continue competition safely. The use of saliva as an alternative sample type can alleviate many of the bottlenecks encountered in the mass testing strategies required to control continuing outbreaks.

Marion Renault is a health and science journalist born in France, bred in the Midwest, and now based in Brooklyn. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, The New Republic, Popular Science and more.

Michele Weldon is emerita faculty in journalism at Northwestern University, a senior leader with The OpEd Project, author of six nonfiction books and journalist for more than 40 years whose work has appeared in Washington Post, New York Times USA Today, CNN, Time, Slate, the Guardian and many more.

David Nuñez is the Director of Technology and Digital Strategy at the MIT Museum. He leads the Museum's digital transformation as it prepares to reboot in a new location in the Spring of 2022. David sits on the Board of Directors of the Museum Computer Network, an organization that seeks to digitally empower museums and museum professionals. Before the MIT Museum, David was the Managing Partner for Midnight Commercial, a design, strategy, and innovation consultancy that invented new products, experiences, and artwork for global brands. His current research seeks to illuminate the humanity existing in computation as he builds projects to explore source code marginalia, speculative human-computer interfaces, and augmented personal productivity systems.

Mallery Quetawki is from the rural Pueblo of Zuni in western New Mexico.  She is the mother of two and shares residence in both Albuquerque and Zuni Pueblo. She received her B.S. in Biology with a minor in Art studio in the summer of 2009 from UNM-ABQ.  She is currently the Artist-in-Residence with the Community Environmental Health Program at the University of New Mexico College of Pharmacy.  Her work with CEHP has focused on tailoring scientific concepts into culturally relatable art and graphics for Native American communities affected by abandoned uranium mines in the United States specifically in the Southwest region of the country.  Her work has recently shifted into creating Covid-19 PSA's and videos for Indigenous communities.

Shereef Elnahal is an American physician who has served in various health care leadership capacities in both the public and private sectors. He was the 21st Commissioner of the New Jersey Department of Health in the State of New Jersey, as a Cabinet official under Governor Phil Murphy. He now serves as the President and CEO of University Hospital in Newark, NJ the principal academic hospital of Rutgers NJ Medical School.

Previously, Elnahal was appointed to the White House Fellows program by President Barack Obama in 2015. In this capacity, he served in the US Department of Veterans Affairs, where he co-founded the Veterans Affairs Innovation Ecosystem, a network of innovators and implementation professionals across the United States who develop and scale best practices that have improved health care quality, women’s health, mental health and substance treatment, and other areas, the results of which have been published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

He also served as the Chief Quality and Patient Safety officer of the Veterans Health Administration, the largest health system in the United States.

David Wallace-Wells is editor at large of New York magazine and the author of the international best-seller The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming, which the New York Times called both "brilliant" and "the scariest book I've ever read," the Guardian called "an epoch-defining book," and the Washington Post called "this generation's Silent Spring." He is a national fellow at the New America Foundation and writes frequently about the near future of science and technology.

Tope Fadiran is a commentator on the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality with religion and popular culture. She has a research background in the history of medicine and has contributed writing on race and gender in American evangelical Christianity and portrayals of Black girls and women and Black communities in American pop culture.

Pat Carroll is a registered respiratory therapist and a registered nurse. She has clinical experience in critical care, emergency/trauma nursing and home health care, and she has taught a variety of health professionals in clinical and classroom settings. Ten years ago, she was diagnosed with primary immune deficiency which completely changed her life (and her husband's). Once she regained her health, she became an active volunteer with the Immune Deficiency Foundation, leading the Get Connected Group in CT. She also became involved with the National Organization for Rare Disease in CT, which has developed a coalition to work on common legislative issues and to make sure that none of our efforts would clash with other groups of people with serious, rare diseases. 

Bob Carroll began his career as a sales representative in technical, industrial sales. He was a sales consultant developing innovative marking techniques in various industries when his company was bought, and all of the sales consultant positions were eliminated. He took this opportunity to take a break and do some substitute teaching to fill his days.  A principal where he was subbing asked him to be a one-to-one paraprofessional for a challenging kindergartener entering the school. He agreed, and worked with this special little boy while going to school at night to get his teaching credential. He then became the first special ed, vocational ed, transitional planner for an alternative high school that served multiple school districts. He taught life skills, job skills and prepared students for a future after high school. He retired from teaching 3 years ago. 

Malka Older is a writer, aid worker, and academic. Named Senior Fellow for Technology and Risk at the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs for 2015, she has more a decade of experience in humanitarian aid and development.

Her research interests include intra-governmental relations in crises; the paradox of well-funded disaster responses; measurement and evaluation of disaster responses; and the effects of competition among actors in humanitarian aid.

Malka Older’s  science-fiction political thriller Infomocracy was named one of the best books of 2016 by Kirkus, Book Riot, and the Washington Post. She is also the author of the sequels, Null States (2017) and State Tectonics (2018). Her short story and poetry collection And Other Disasters came out in late 2019.

Lori Peek – who has been a guest three previous times on COVID Calls! – is a professor in the Department of Sociology and director of the Natural Hazards Center at the University of Colorado Boulder. She studies marginalized populations in disaster and is author of Behind the Backlash: Muslim Americans after 9/11, co-editor of Displaced: Life in the Katrina Diaspora, and co-author of Children of Katrina. Lori received her Ph.D. in Sociology in 2005 from the University of Colorado Boulder, where she studied under Dennis Mileti and worked as his research assistant at the Natural Hazards Center.

Amanda Ripley is an investigative journalist for The Atlantic and other magazines and a New York Times bestselling author. Her newest book, released just this month, is High Conflict: Why We Get Trapped and How We Get Out. She also wrote The Smartest Kids in the World: And How They Got That Way, about education, and The Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes—and Why, about the lessons of disaster survivors. In that last book, The Unthinkable, she featured Dennis Mileti, one of her favorite sources during the many years she spent covering disasters and homeland security for Time Magazine in New York, Washington, and Paris. Her stories have helped Time win two National Magazine Awards.

Dennis Mileti was a giant in the natural hazards field and impacted many researchers (including me) as well as practitioners with his insights as well as his clear vision. He was interested in other people’s ideas and responded with constructive comments that reflected his views on the topic without indicating that he expected you to adopt them. For these reasons, Dennis was admired and respected in the hazards field by everyone I have known.

Dan Wakin has been a journalist at The New York Times since 2000.  He currently is an editor on the Obituary News desk, where he has been editing the series "Those We've Lost" on Covid dead. Previously, he was deputy editorial director of NYT Global, a strategic team focused on international audience, and a deputy editor of the Culture desk.

As a reporter, his beats included religion, classical music and dance, and general assignment. He has covered stories in more than a dozen countries in Asia, the Middle East, Europe and Latin America. He helped lead the team that produced the Emmy-nominated multimedia project “Inside the Quartet.”

A graduate of Harvard University with a degree in the classics, Dan is an avid amateur clarinetist. He is the author of “The Man With the Sawed-Off Leg and Other Tales of a New York City Block” (Arcade, 2018).

Paige Cornwell is a reporter at The Seattle Times. She attended the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and is originally from Kansas City, Kan.

Chris Megerian covers the White House from the Los Angeles Times’ D.C. bureau. He previously wrote about the Russia investigation, the 2016 presidential campaign and the 2015 United Nations summit on global warming in Paris. While based in Sacramento, he reported on Gov. Jerry Brown, climate change policies, California politics and state finances. Before joining The Times in January 2012, he spent three years covering politics and law enforcement at the Star-Ledger in New Jersey. He grew up in Massachusetts and graduated from Emory University in Atlanta.

Jinri Kim holds a Masters in Public Policy, specialised in Social Policy and Social Innovation, and is a Foreign research correspondent at Korea Institute for Health and Social Affairs (KIHASA), writing articles on France's social policy issues in the journal "Global Social Security Review"

Jinri wrote a masters thesis: Intimate Stranger: A Study of Filipino Domestic Workers in France.  He is also Co-founder of a home food waste app, EmptyMyFridge.

Dr. Woojae Kim is a Geneticist. He is interested in social insects such as honeybees and ants. Bachelor's degree in Biology at Yonsei University in Korea. He received master's and phD degree in molecular virology at POSTECH. While doing post doctoral research in the US he started to research on drosophila behavioral genetics. He was previously at in Otawa university and is currently at Harbin Institute of Technology in China, researching molecular mechanisms of social behaviors and neurocircuits.  He is a author of several books including "Fly-room", and "Selected Nature."

David Hassler directs the Wick Poetry Center at Kent State University. He is the author or editor of nine books of poetry and nonfiction, including Growing Season: The Life of a Migrant Community; Speak a Powerful Magic: Ten Years of the Traveling Stanzas Poetry Project; and Red Kimono, Yellow Barn, for which he was awarded Ohio Poet of the Year 2006. His play, May 4th Voices: Kent State, 1970, was produced in 2020 as a national radio play by the WKSU NPR station.

LAKSHMI FJORD, Ph.D. is an environmental justice anthropologist whose community participatory action research methods and evidence led to two historic legal precedents for environmental justice at the federal and Virginia state level. For the first time, a federal appeals court overturned the air permit to site the largest U.S. fracked gas compressor station in an 83% majority Freedmen descent community on the basis of environmental justice. This contributed to the cancellation of the $8 billion dollar Atlantic Coast Pipeline. With Devva Kasnitz and Pam Block, Lakshmi was a foremother of Disability Studies in Anthropology, and Deaf Studies in Disability Studies. She organized the first AAA panel on Disability and Disasters immediately after Katrina in 2005, recruiting Elaine Gerber and Karen Nakamura. She now works in 4 Freedmen-built communities in Virginia facing imminent threats of new toxic polluting infrastructure.

Elaine Gerber is a medical anthropologist and disability studies scholar at Montclair State University, and a former president of the Society for Disability Studies.  Prior to joining the faculty at MSU, she served for five years as the Senior Research Associate for the American Foundation for the Blind (AFB) and taught in the graduate program in Disability Studies at the City University of New York. Her work examines the intersection between culture and the body, initially with a focus on women’s reproductive health, and more recently, on disability. Current projects revolve around food insecurity and disablement, audio description, and cultures of ableism. There are both theoretical contributions and practical applications to her work.

LENORE MANDERSON is Distinguished Professor of Public Health and Medical Anthropology in the School of Public Health, University of the Witwatersrand, and an NRF A-rated scholar. She holds appointments also with Brown University, US, and Monash University, Australia. Known internationally for her work on inequality, social exclusion and the impact of compromised health and embodied difference in Australia, Southeast and East Asia, and Africa, she has published some 750 books, articles, book chapters and reports in these and other areas. She chairs the External Review Group of the Social Innovations in Health Initiative of TDR (2015-) and is a member of the Board of Directors of the Society for Applied Anthropology (SfAA). She was awarded the Society of Medical Anthropology Career Achievement Award in 2016, and in January 2020 was admitted as a Member of the Order of Australia.

Deborah Carr is professor and chair of the sociology department at Boston University. She has written more than 100 articles and book chapters on topics related to aging, health, and stress. Her recent books including Worried Sick: How Stress Hurts Us & How to Bounce Back, and Golden Years? Social Inequalities in Later Life. She was editor-in-chief of Journal of Gerontology: Social Sciences from 2015-2020. Her work has been featured in media outlets including The New York Times, NBC Nightly News, and USA Today.

Hannah Tessler is a PhD student at Yale University. She graduated from Hamilton College with a BA in sociology. Her research focuses on race/ethnicity, gender, education, and social interactions. 

Meera Choi is a PhD student at Yale University. She received her BA and MA in sociology from Ewha Womans University in Seoul, South Korea. Her research focuses on gender, family, and urban sociology. 

Samantha Vanderslott is a University Research Lecturer at Oxford Vaccine Group, University of Oxford. Her research is about people’s attitudes and behaviours towards vaccination. She draws on perspectives from sociology, history, anthropology, global health, and science and technology studies (STS). She is particularly interested in public policy and media representation, as well as making comparisons across countries and time.

This Is Chance!: The Shaking of An American City, A Voice that Held it Together

Jon Mooallem is a longtime writer at large with The New York Times Magazine and a contributor to numerous other radio shows and magazines, including This American Life, The Daily, 99% Invisible, California Sunday and Wired. He's frequently talked about his reporting on radio and television shows (like Fresh Air, Radiolab, and The Colbert Report) and at the TED conference in Vancouver. Occasionally, he collaborates on live storytelling and music projects with members of the Decemberists.

Jon's most recent book, THIS IS CHANCE!, tells the story of the 1964 Great Alaskan Earthquake and radio reporter Genie Chance. The Wall Street Journal called it "A powerful, heart-wrenching book, as much art as it is journalism." Amazon, Buzzfeed and Brainpickings selected THIS IS CHANCE! as one of the best books of 2020 and it’s in the process of being adapted into a film. His last book, Wild Ones was chosen as a notable book of the year by The New York Times Book Review, The New Yorker, NPR’s Science Friday, and Canada’s National Post, among others. He lives on Bainbridge Island, next to Seattle. During the pandemic, he's primarily been a father. Also, he built a fence.

This Is Chance!: The Shaking of An American City, A Voice that Held it Together

Zoe Mendel is a senior at Villanova, participating in the health affiliations six-year Doctor of Physical Therapy program through Thomas Jefferson University. In addition to completing her Bachelor of Science in Biology in May of 2021, she is currently a first year Doctor of Physical Therapy Student and will graduate from Jefferson in 2023.  She is an active member of the Physical Therapy Society, an organization that raises money for physical therapy-based charities, and is an officer at Hands of Hope; a Pro Bono clinic located in South Philadelphia.

Rebecca Winer is an Associate Professor of History at Villanova University specializing in the Middle Ages. Her research focuses on women, gender, and Christian-Jewish-Muslim relations in medieval Roussillon (in southern France) and Catalonia (in Eastern Spain), and Slavery Studies. She is the author of Women, Wealth, and Community in Perpignan, c. 1250–1300: Christians, Jews, and Enslaved Muslims in a Medieval Mediterranean Town (Ashgate, 2006) as well as numerous essays on medieval mothers, childcare, Jewish women, domestic service, slavery, and notarial culture in the Middle Ages. She is coeditor with Federica Francesconi of Jewish Women's History from Antiquity to the Present (Wayne State University Press, forthcoming fall 2021).

Hyungsub Choi is associate professor in the School of Liberal Arts at Seoul National University of Science and Technology. He is interested in technological artifacts in modern Korean history. Together with Heewon Kim, Hyungsub worked on the masking behavior in Korea during the current pandemic.

Jaehwan Hyun is Assistant Professor of Science and Technology Studies (STS) at Pusan National University, South Korea. He is working on the post-WWII history of human biology and environmental sciences with a focus on transnational connections between South Korea, Japan, and the United States. He is also making an effort to create a research collective in studying the history of mask-wearing in East Asia. As part of this effort, he organized a virtual workshop titled "The Socio-Material History of Masked Societies in East Asia" last October. The workshop outcome is now under review at the East Asian Science, Technology, and Society Journal.

Michael Barany is a historian of science and mathematics in the Science Technology and Innovation Studies subject group at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. He completed his 2016 PhD in the history of science at Princeton University and was a member of the Dartmouth College Society of Fellows. His current research focuses on the globalization of modern mathematics and on the social and material infrastructures (most notably the blackboard) of abstract knowledge.

Wesley James currently serves as Associate Professor of Sociology and Executive Director of the Center for Community Research and Evaluation (CCRE) at the University of Memphis. He received his Ph.D. from Mississippi State University in 2009.

Dr. James' primary research interests are medical sociology, demography, and rural health. He has been involved in several externally supported research projects exploring a variety of health-related issues. Currently, his research agenda is focused in three areas: (1) U.S. mortality disparities across time and place, (2) social determinants of health and mortality in rural America, and (3) evaluating health and educational interventions in the Mississippi Delta.

Dr. James has been published in American Journal of Public Health, Social Science and Medicine Population Health, Demographic Research, N-IUSSP, Population Research and Policy Review, Journal of Rural Health, and many others.

Kimberly Terrell earned a Ph.D. in Conservation Biology (a field of biology focused on protecting nature) from the University of New Orleans in 2011 and dual bachelor’s degrees in Biology and Political Science from Tulane University in 2005. Dr. Terrell’s graduate research was conducted at the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute (Washington, DC) and focused on endangered cat species. Throughout her experience as a scientist, Dr. Terrell has always felt strongly connected to the culture and environment of the Gulf Coast. Inspired by this connection, Dr. Terrell joined the Environmental Law Clinic in 2018 as the Director of Community Outreach. With her knowledge of environmental issues and experience working with diverse communities, Dr. Terrell helps concerned citizens engage in environmental decision-making and access the legal resources of the Environmental Law Clinic. Dr. Terrell considers herself a native of the Mississippi River Basin, having lived most of her life in New Orleans, Chicago, and Memphis.

Peter Chin-Hong is Associate Dean for Regional Campuses of the UCSF school of medicine. He is a medical educator who specializes in treating infectious diseases, particularly infections that develop in patients who have suppressed immune systems, such as solid organ and hematopoietic stem cell transplant recipients and HIV+ organ transplant recipients. He directs the immunocompromised host infectious diseases program at UCSF. His research focuses on donor derived infections in transplant recipients and molecular diagnostics of infectious diseases in patients with suppressed immune systems. He earned his undergraduate and medical degrees from Brown University, before completing an internal medicine residency and infectious diseases fellowship at UCSF, where he is Professor of Medicine and Director of the Yearlong Inquiry Program in the School of Medicine. He was the inaugural holder of the Academy of Medical Educators Endowed Chair for Innovation in Teaching.

Hannah Zeavin  is a Lecturer in the Departments of English and History at UC Berkeley, and a faculty affiliate of the University of California at Berkeley Center for Science, Technology, Medicine, and Society.  Her research focuses on the coordinated histories of technology and medicine. Zeavin is the author of  The Distance Cure: A History of Teletherapy  (MIT Press, August 2021)   and at work on her second book,  Mother’s Little Helpers: Technology in the American Family  (MIT Press, 2023) .  Other work has appeared or is forthcoming   in   differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, Logic Magazine,  the  Los Angeles Review of Books, Slate,  and elsewhere.

Alex was my guest on November 12, 2021 and on that day there were 242,310 deaths—today 552,073.

Alex Goldstein created FacesOfCOVID in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic as a means of lifting up the stories behind the statistics of those lost to COVID and affirming their dignity, and holding our government leaders accountable for our failures to adequately respond to the pandemic. 

Goldstein is currently CEO of the strategic communications firm 90 West, which he founded in 2016 to better serve companies, organizations, and leaders that are making a positive impact on the world -- with a focus on equity, economic mobility, and the climate crisis. 

Prior to founding 90 West, Alex served for eight years in numerous key leadership roles with former Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick, including as senior advisor and executive director of Governor Patrick’s political committee, as press secretary and spokesman for the Patrick-Murray administration from 2011-2012, and as press secretary on Governor Patrick’s successful 2010 reelection campaign.

Most recently, Alex served as the senior communications advisor and spokesman for Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley’s historic and successful campaign for Massachusetts’ 7th Congressional District.

Jason Kauffman is the Director of Archives and Records Management for Mennonite Church USA in Elkhart, Indiana. Along with managing and providing access to the recorded history of the church, he also interprets and raises awareness about Mennonite history for the broader denomination. A graduate of Goshen College (a Mennonite college in northern Indiana), he has a M.A. in Latin American History from the University of New Mexico and a Ph.D. in Latin American History from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.  He is also a Certified Archivist and has a Digital Archives Specialist Certificate from the Society of American Archivists. He has a growing interest in oral history and directed his first oral history project in 2019.

Jean Kilheffer Hess is Executive Director of Lancaster Mennonite Historical Society in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. With a staff of 18, three museums, and a historic site hosting a home built in 1719 and a Native longhouse replica, the Lancaster Mennonite Historical Society interprets Mennonite life and early Pennsylvania history. Jean is a graduate of Messiah University and Anabaptist Mennonite Biblical Seminary. She is especially energized by collaborative efforts that help people value their own and others' stories: both historical and "history in the making."

Samantha Montano is an assistant professor of emergency management at Massachusetts Maritime Academy. Her forthcoming book DISASTEROLOGY: Dispatches from The Front Lines of The Climate Crisis comes out this August. She is also author of recent essay: Not All Disasters Are Disasters: Pandemic Categorization and Its Consequences with Amanda Savitt on SSRC Disaster Studies.

Jeff Schlegelmilch is a Research Scholar and the Director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness at Columbia University’s Earth Institute.  He oversees projects related to the practice and policy of disaster preparedness, including the multi-award winning Resilient Children / Resilient Communities Initiative. Prior to his work at Columbia, he was the Manager for the International and Non-Healthcare Business Sector for the Yale New Haven Health System Center for Emergency Preparedness and Disaster Response. He was also previously an epidemiologist and emergency planner for the Boston Public Health Commission.

He is the author Rethinking Readiness: A brief guide to twenty-first-century megadisasters published by Columbia University Press.

Daniel Alfonso Colón-Ramos is the McConnell Duberg Professor of Neuroscience and Cell Biology at Yale University School of Medicine, where his lab studies the cell biology of the synapse during development and learning. Daniel was born and raised in Puerto Rico. He completed his B.A. at Harvard University, his PhD in the lab of Dr. Sally Kornbluth at Duke University and was a postdoctoral fellow in the lab of Dr. Kang Shen at Stanford University. He is also the founder of the nonprofit organization Ciencia Puerto Rico (CienciaPR), a collaborative network for people interested in science and Puerto Rico. In 2020, he was named to the National Academy of Medicine.

Congresswoman Nikema Williams represents Georgia’s 5th congressional district in the US House of Representatives.

The Fifth Congressional District is a historic district, a seat formerly held by Congresswoman Williams’ friend and mentor, civil rights icon the late Congressman John Lewis. Congressman Lewis represented the Fifth District for over 30 years, until his passing in 2020. Congresswoman Williams contributed to history by being elected as the first Black woman to represent Georgia’s Fifth Congressional District. 

Congresswoman Williams was elected as the Freshman Class President for the 117th Congress. As President, she organizes and advances the interests of her Freshmen Democratic colleagues to fulfill their oath to work for the people. 

Before her congressional election, Congresswoman Williams served in the Georgia State Senate.  As a State Senator, Williams got in the “Good Trouble” Congressman John Lewis spoke about. In the wake of the disastrous 2018 Georgia elections, marked with rampant voter suppression, she was arrested at the Georgia State Capitol while peacefully protesting with her constituents that every vote be counted.  

Congresswoman Williams was born in Columbus, GA and raised by her grandparents in Smiths Station, Alabama. She attended Talladega College – a liberal arts Historically Black College in Talladega, Alabama.

Williams, and A. Hannibal Leach.

Dr. A. Hannibal Leach is the Interim Assistant Dean of the School of Humanities and Behavioral Social Sciences of Fisk University. He is also an Assistant Professor of Political Science and director of the African American Studies program.  He is the author of The Social Context of Public Opinion and Foreign Policy, which explores the role social identity plays in shaping mass attitudes toward U.S. foreign policy. His current research uses computational methods to understand how critical race theory helps to explain political phenomena in the context of international politics and amongst American political leadership. Dr. Leach also authors a tri-monthly publication known as the Leach Political Report. The publication provides an informed Black perspective on political issues concerning the American South.

Andrea Ringer is an Atlantic World scholar at TSU, with a focus on the history of transnational workers. Her current project asks questions about the circus as a workplace and the history of its migrant laborers.  Using more than a dozen archives from across the country, interviews, trade journals, and hundreds of local newspapers, her work explores how the relevancy of the circus depended on the blurred lines between worker and performer.  Her previous publications explore punitive justice and prison privatization, and she currently has two articles on circus workers currently in revision.  “’Because it is cheaper and better’: 1980s Corrections Policies and Prison Privatization in Tennessee,” Tennessee Historical Quarterly, Summer 2018.

Learotha Williams, Jr., PhD. is a scholar of African American, Civil War and Reconstruction, and Public History at Tennessee State University.  

Dr. Williams has worked as a Historic Sites Specialist for the State of Florida, acted as coordinator of the African American Studies Program at Armstrong Atlantic State University, and served as a trustee of the Historic Savannah Foundation in Savannah, Georgia.

At TSU, he coordinates the North Nashville Heritage Project, an effort that seeks to encourage a greater understanding of the history of North Nashville, including but not limited to Jefferson Street and its historic relationship to the greater Nashville community.

His most recent publication is a work he coedited with Amie Thurber entitled, I'll Take You There: Exploring Nashville's Sites of Social Justice which will be published by Vanderbilt University Press in April 2021.

Lori Smetanka is the Executive Director of the National Consumer Voice for Quality Long-Term Care, the leading national nonprofit advocacy organization representing consumers receiving long-term care and services in nursing homes, assisted living facilities, and home and community based settings. Lori has testified before Congress and served on federal task forces, technical expert panels, and working groups on long-term care issues.

From 2004 – 2016 she served as the Director of the National Long-Term Care Ombudsman Resource Center, providing technical assistance, training, and support to the 53 State and more than 570 local long-term care ombudsman programs across the country. She received a B.A. from Indiana University of Pennsylvania, and a J.D. from the University of Dayton School of Law.

Dr. Jasmine Travers is an Assistant Professor at New York University Rory Meyers College of Nursing. Her career is dedicated to designing and conducting research to improve health outcomes and reduce health disparities in vulnerable older adult groups using both quantitative and qualitative approaches. As a health services researcher, she has leveraged many datasets to investigate these issues and has published widely on the topics of aging, long-term care, health disparities, workforce issues, and infections. Prior to joining the faculty at NYU, Dr. Travers completed a postdoctoral fellowship with the National Clinician Scholars Program at Yale University and a T32 funded postdoctoral fellowship at the New Courtland Center for Transitions and Health at the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing. She completed her doctoral training in health services research with a specialization in gerontology at Columbia University School of Nursing.

Lyz Lenz: Lyz’s writing has appeared in the Huffington Post, The Washington Post, the Columbia Journalism Review, The New York Times, Pacific Standard, and others. Her book  God Land  was published in 2019, through Indiana University Press. Her second book Belabored , was published in 2020 by Bold Type Books. Lyz’s essay “All the Angry Women” was also included in the anthology  Not that Bad  edited by Roxane Gay. Lyz received her MFA in creative writing from Lesley University. She lives in Iowa.

Lucianne Walkowicz is an astronomer at the Adler Planetarium in Chicago and the co-founder of the JustSpace Alliance. Walkowicz studies the ethics of Mars exploration, stellar magnetic activity, how stars influence a planet’s suitability as a host for alien life, and how to use advanced computing to discover unusual events in large astronomical data sets. From 2017-2018, they were the Baruch S. Blumberg NASA/LOC Chair in Astrobiology at the Library of Congress. Walkowicz is the founding director of the LSSTC Data Science Fellowship Program, an initiative to provide astronomy graduate students with training in advanced computing. Walkowicz speaks and writes regularly on topics at the intersection of science and society, which have appeared on TED.com, Slate, The Washington Post, Vox, and more. Walkowicz holds a BS in Physics and Astronomy from Johns Hopkins University, an MS and PhD in Astronomy from the University of Washington, and held postdoctoral fellowships at UC Berkeley and Princeton prior to joining the Adler Planetarium. They are also a TED Senior Fellow and a practicing artist, working in a variety of media, from performance to sound.

Dr. Ashton Verdery is an Associate Professor of Sociology, Demography, and Social Data Analytics at the Pennsylvania State University. His research deals with questions about how demographic and family change affect the health and wellbeing of people in different countries.

Dr. Chavi Eve Karkowsky completed her undergraduate degree at Yale University, followed by medical school at Mount Sinai Icahn School of Medicine in New York City. She then finished internship and residency in obstetrics and gynecology at the integrated program at Brigham and Women's Hospital and Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, followed by a fellowship in Maternal-Fetal Medicine (MFM).  Dr. Karkowsky continues to work as a high risk obstetrics specialist in New York City, where she leads initiatives in outpatient care (during COVID, as well as during non-pandemic times, when they return).She also writes for the lay press, with publications in Slate, the Atlantic, the Washington Post, and elsewhere; her first book, "High Risk: Stories of Pregnancy, Birth, and the Unexpected" (Norton/Liveright 2020) was published this year. She lives with her 4 stir-crazy kids and spouse in NYC. 

Dr. Esther Chernak.  Esther is a professor in the Department of Environmental Health, Drexel University School of Public Health, and has a position in the Drexel University College of Medicine. She is the director of the Center for Public Health Readiness and Communication at Drexel. Prior to joining the Drexel faculty in 2010, Dr. Chernak worked at the Philadelphia Department of Public Health for over 25 years.

Yeonsil Kang is a currently a visiting assistant professor at Drexel University’s history department. She is interested in understanding the intersections of the environment, science/technology, and disasters especially in East Asia. She is working on a project, Mineral Time, Bodily Time: Asbestos, Slow Disaster, and Toxic Politics in South Korea which explores the history and politics of asbestos, the environmental hazard that shaped environmental health policies in South Korea.

Andy Revkin served as strategic adviser for environmental and science journalism at National Geographic Society. Through 2017 he was senior reporter for climate change at the independent investigative newsroom ProPublica. He was a reporter for The New York Times from 1995 through 2009. In 2007, he created the Dot Earth environmental blog for The Times. The blog moved to the Opinion Pages in 2010 and ran through 2016.  He is now director of the new Initiative on Communication and Sustainability at Columbia University's Earth Institute.

Felicia Henry is a Ph.D. Student in the Department of Sociology and Criminal Justice at the University of Delaware. Her research interests include race, ethnicity, gender, criminal justice/mass incarceration, social vulnerability and resilience in disasters, and communities. A Licensed Social Worker (LMSW), Felicia received her Master of Social Work degree from the School of Social Policy and Practice at the University of Pennsylvania. Felicia is also a Bill Anderson Fund Fellow

Kristin Urquiza, is the Co-founder, Chief Activist of Marked by COVID.  Kristin is a graduate of Yale University and UC Berkeley’s Goldman School of Public Policy where she has a Master of Public Affairs. She is an environmental advocate at Mighty Earth, where she works to hold corporations accountable to their industrial agricultural practices that displace indigenous people from their lands and drive deforestation in places like the Amazon rainforest and beyond. Additionally, Kristin works closely with Liberation in a Generation, a group working to narrow the wealth gap between people of color and white families in the United States within a generation.

Shivani Patel  is a 2nd year student at Drexel University studying Finance and Economics. She is a production assistant here at COVID-Calls, helping to connect with guests and also a representative on Drexel's student government, working to voice the concerns of the student body to administration.

Bucky Stanton is a PhD Candidate in the department of Science & Technology Studies at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. His dissertation investigates natural and cultural resource extraction in the central Peloponnese of Greece, exploring the history and politics of archaeology, energy and modernity in contemporary Greece and beyond

Kyle Riismandel is a Senior University Lecturer and the Interim Director of the Law, Technology, and Culture Program in the Federated Department of History at the New Jersey Institute of Technology/Rutgers-Newark. He is a cultural historian of cities, suburbs, media, and technology in recent American history. In addition to teaching courses in those areas, he is the author

Neighborhood of Fear: The Suburban Crisis in American Culture, 1975-2001, a Smithsonian scholars favorite book of 2020. 

Mary Rizzo is Assistant Professor of History at Rutgers University-Newark. She is the author of Come and Be Shocked: Baltimore Beyond John Waters and The Wire (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2020) and Class Acts: Young Men and the Rise of Lifestyle (University of Nevada Press). She is also the founder of the Chicory Revitalization Project, which uses the black community poetry magazine Chicory to spur dialogue on place and identity.

Taylor Mali is one of the most well-known poets to have emerged from the poetry slam movement. He was one of the original poets to appear on the HBO series Russell Simmons Presents Def Poetry and was the “Armani-clad villain” of Paul Devlin’s 1997 documentary film SlamNation. His poem “What Teachers Make” has been viewed over 4 million times on YouTube and was quoted by the New York Times’ Thomas Friedman in one of his commencement addresses.

Mali is a vocal advocate of teachers and the nobility of teaching, having spent nine years in the classroom teaching everything from English and history to math and S.A.T. test preparation. He has performed and lectured for teachers all over the world; and in 2012 he reached his goal of creating one thousand new teachers through “poetry, persuasion, and perseverance.” Based on the poem that inspired a movement, his book of essays, What Teachers Make: In Praise of the Greatest Job in the World, is his passionate defense of teachers drawing on his own experiences, both in the classroom and as a traveling poet.

He is the author of four books of poetry, Late Father and Other Poems (Quercus Review Press, 2018) Bouquet of Red Flags (Write Bloody Books, 2014), The Last Time As We Are (Write Bloody Books, 2009), and What Learning Leaves (Hanover, 2002); and four CDs of spoken word.

Chris White is Professor of Latin American History at Marshall University. is a professor of Latin American history. He is the author of The War on Drugs in the Americas Creating a Third World: Mexico, Cuba, and the United States during the Castro Era (New Mexico, 2007), as well as The History of El Salvador (Greenwood, 2008) and A Global History of the Developing World (Routledge, 2013).  He is a former Marine, and his research specializes in drugs and epidemics. He also hosts the podcast, "COVID in Appalachia with Chris White.

Erika Lee is a Regents Professor of History and Asian American Studies and Director of the Immigration History Research Center at the University of Minnesota. Recently elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, she is the Vice President of the Organization of American Historians and author of four award-winning books, including, most recently, The Making of Asian America: A History and America for Americans: A History of Xenophobia in the United States. America for Americans won an American Book Award and the Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature. It was also 

highlighted by the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the New York Public Library as one of the most important books illuminating the Trump era and informing essential issues in the 2020 election. 

Maddalena Marinari is associate professor of history at Gustavus Adolphus College. She has written extensively on immigration restriction, U.S. immigration policy, and immigrant mobilization. Her book Unwanted: Italian And Jewish Mobilization Against Restrictive Immigration Laws, 1882–1965 (2020) explores Italian and Jewish mobilization against restrictive immigration laws from 1882 to 1965. Along She is co-editor, with Maria Cristina Garcia and Madeline Hsu, she is one of the editors of A Nation of Immigrants Reconsidered: U.S. Society in an Age of Restriction, 1924–1965 (2019), an anthology on the impact of immigration restriction on the United States in the twentieth century. She is the co-editor with Erika Lee of a forthcoming special issue of the Journal of American History on the hundredth anniversary of the passage of the Emergency Quota Act of 1921 and the Immigration Act of 1924.

Sulfikar Amir is an associate professor of science, technology, and society (STS) and a faculty member in Sociology Program at the School of Social Sciences, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. He has conducted research on technological nationalism, development and globalization, nuclear politics, risk and disaster, design studies, cities and infrastructures, and resilience. He is the author of The Technological State in Indonesia: the Co-constitution of High Technology and Authoritarian Politics (Routledge, 2012), and the editor of The Sociotechnical Constitution of Resilience: A New Perspective on Governing Risk and Disaster (Palgrave, 2018). Aside from being a scholar, Amir is a documentary filmmaker. His latest film is Healing Fukushima, which chronicles the role and experiences of medical experts in Fukushima in dealing with radiation hazard in the aftermath of the nuclear disaster.

Kohta Juraku is a professor at Tokyo Denki University (TDU), Japan. He has worked on sociological studies of the governance of risky technologies and the social-learning process from major technological failures. Before joining TDU, he worked at the Department of Nuclear Engineering and Management at the University of Tokyo from 2008 to 2012, during which he spent over a year at the Department of Nuclear Engineering, UC Berkeley as a visiting scholar. He received his PhD from the University of Tokyo for his research on the social-decision making process of nuclear and other energy issues. As a sociologist of science and technology, he has conducted participant observation of nuclear experts’ responses to the Fukushima nuclear disaster both in Japan and US.

Kyoko Sato is Associate Director of the Program in Science, Technology, and Society at Stanford University. Her research examines technoscientific governance in Japan and the United States. She is currently co-editing a collective volume (with Soraya Boudia and Bernadette Bensaude Vincent), Living in a Nuclear World: From Fukushima to Hiroshima, an interdisciplinary post-Fukushima reflection on the development of the global nuclear order. She has conducted fieldwork in various areas affected by nuclear technology to examine the dynamics and relationships among global and national nuclear governance, expertise, and democratic citizenship. She is part of Comparative Covid Response, an on-going study on the pandemic response of 16 countries (led by Steve Hilgartner and Sheila Jasanoff). She worked as a journalist in Tokyo before pursuing her PhD in sociology from Princeton University.

Ryuma Shineha is an associate professor at the Research Center on Ethical, Legal, and Social Issues(ELSI Research Center), Osaka University. 

His major is Science & Technology Studies (STS) and Science Policy Studies. He received his PhD from Kyoto University in 2011. His current research theme is understanding of agendas on responsible research and innovation (RRI) of emerging science and practice to upstream engagement on these RRI agendas. In addition, after 3.11, he started research of the media ecosystem and social structural issues concerning 3.11with his collaborators.

João Machado has been a research fellow in History of Science and Technology since 2012, and since 2020, a PhD candidate in History, Philosophy and Heritage of Science and Technology at the NOVA School of Science and Technology. His project is concerned with computing in Portugal in the 1980s, linking the framing of computing as a wider social concern with the new development perspectives opened by the 1974 Democratic Revolution.

Inês Navalhas is a PhD candidate in History, Philosophy, and Heritage of Science and Technology at NOVA School of Science and Technology. Her thesis concerns science communication in a portuguese book collection focused on science and technology. Inês is recently working in an European Project called NEWSERA, related to citizen science as a new form of science communication and ENJOI, also an European Project regarding science journalism in Europe.

Tiago Saraiva is Associate Professor of History at Drexel University, coeditor with Amy Slaton of the journal History and Technology, and author of Fascist Pigs: Technoscientific Organisms and the History of Fascism (2016). He is currently studying the significance of cloning Californian oranges for the history of racial capitalism in the United States, South Africa, Algeria, Palestine, and Brazil, and completing Moving Crops and the Scales of History, a collective manuscript with multiple co-authors.

Hugo Soares is a Ph.D. candidate in History, Philosophy, and Heritage of Science and Technology at the New University of Lisbon. His dissertation project studies the development of the Portuguese Scientific Research System after the 1974 Democratic Revolution and he has also been developing work in Material Culture and Scientific Instruments.

Robert Soden is an Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto working on crisis informatics, human-centered computing (HCC), and science and technology studies (STS). His research uses a range of ethnographic, participatory, and design research methods to evaluate and improve the technologies we use to understand and respond to environmental challenges like disasters and climate change.

He holds a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Colorado Boulder, and orior to starting his PhD, he was a researcher at the The Center for Neighborhood Technology and the World Resources Institute, a software developer at Development Seed, and a consultant to the World Bank’s Global Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery (GFDRR).

Jacqueline Wernimont is Distinguished Chair of Digital Humanities and Social Engagement & Associate Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Dartmouth College

She is an anti-racist, feminist scholar working toward greater justice in digital cultures and a network weaver across humanities, arts, and sciences.

Her first book, Numbered Lives: Life and Death in Quantum Media came out with MIT Press in 2019—it uses a two-part structure to historicize the counting of life and death in Britain and the United States.  She is also the co-editor of the recent Bodies of Information: Intersectional Feminism and Digital Humanities (with Elizabeth Losh).

Daniel Joslyn is a PhD candidate in history at New York University, whose work recovers a largely forgotten transnational mystical feminist socialist movement at the turn of the twentieth century. He is a core member of Mutual Aid NYC, and is in the process of building an online open-source library by and for organizers across movements in and around New York City to co-locate, find and preserve materials vital to their organizing work. He is also the co-editor of notariot.com, an educational resource teaching people about the roots of the 2020 uprising in the black radical tradition.

Tyesha Maddox is an Assistant Professor at Fordham University in the Department of African and African American Studies.  She received her PhD in History from New York University in 2016.  She received a BA in History and Africana Studies and a MPS in Africana Studies both from Cornell University.  Her current manuscript, "From Invisible to Immigrants: Political Activism and the Construction of Caribbean American Identity, 1890-1940," examines the significance of early twentieth century Anglophone Caribbean immigrant mutual aid societies and benevolent associations in New York. 

Kevin M. Kruse is a Professor of History at Princeton University. He specializes in the political, social, and urban/suburban history of twentieth-century America, with a particular interest in conflicts over race, rights and religion and the making of modern conservatism. Kevin is currently conducting research for his new book, The Division: John Doar, the Justice Department, and the Civil Rights Movement (contracted to Basic Books)

He is also the co-author with Julian Zelizer of Fault Lines: A History of the United States since 1974 (W.W. Norton, January 2019); One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America; White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism and numerous additional edited and co-authored volumes.

He also maintains a lively social media presence on Twitter: @KevinMKruse

Britt Dahlberg completed a Phd in Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. Before BeyondBetter, she co-designed and led the five-year REACH Ambler Project to use ethnography, oral history, and theater to open up spaces for public dialogue about environmental risk and uncertainty in social and historical context. Britt recently took up the role of Director of Research, of the Center for Humanism, Professionalism, Ethics, and Law, at Cooper Medical School of Rowan University

Jessica Martucci completed a PhD in the History and Sociology of Science, and later earned a Masters degree in Bioethics, at the University of Pennsylvania. Prior to launching Beyond Better, she spent three years leading an Oral History Project that documented the experiences of disabled Scientists.

Dr. Cengiz Kılıç graduated from Istanbul University Medical School in 1984, and did his residency training at Hacettepe University. He is currently professor of psychiatry, working full-time at the psychiatry department of Hacettepe University Medical School in Ankara.

As a member of the academic staff, he takes part in education directed both to students and residents, in addition to clinical work. His main clinical and research interests are in the area of anxiety disorders, traumatic stress, psychiatric assessment and epidemiology. After the major earthquakes of 1999 in Turkey, he took part as research and clinical supervisor in an international project led by University of London, Institute of Psychiatry, where he also completed his PhD. He was the principal investigator of the first nationally representative epidemiological survey, the “Mental Health Profile of Turkey”, and co- PI of the World Mental Health Survey-Turkey. He is associate editor of two scientific journals: the Turkish Journal of Psychiatry, and the Journal of Traumatic Stress.

Beaudry Rae Allen is the Digital and Preservation Archivist at Villanova University. Allen holds a Masters in Archives and Records Management from San Jose State University and a Masters in European History from Villanova University. In addition, she is deeply involved with the local Philadelphia archives community by serving on the organizing committee of A4BLiP (Archives for Black Lives in Philadelphia) and DEI committee for PACSCL (Philadelphia Area Consortium of Special Collections Libraries).

Erica Y. Hayes is a Digital Scholarship Librarian at Villanova University, where she coordinates Falvey Memorial Library’s digital scholarship program and collaborates with faculty and students on digital research projects. Prior to joining Villanova University, she was a North Carolina State University Libraries Fellow and the project manager on the Immersive Scholar Andrew W. Mellon Foundation grant. She holds a Master of Information Science and a Master of Library Science dual degree from Indiana University, Bloomington, with a specialization in digital libraries. 

William Horne, Co-Founder and Editor of The Activist History Review, is an Arthur J. Ennis Postdoctoral Fellow at Villanova University who writes about the relationship of race to labor, freedom, disability, and capitalism in post-Civil War Louisiana. He holds a PhD in History from The George Washington University and can be followed on Twitter at @wihorne.

Céire Kealty is a doctoral student in the Theology and Religious Studies Department at Villanova University. Her work employs fashion theory and theological ethics to interrogate the fashion industry and its contribution to labor exploitation, racism, and environmental degradation. She is also interested in garments as loci of power, mystery, and presence, in both religious and “secular” settings. Before coming to Villanova, she studied at Iona College in New Rochelle, NY, and received a BA in Religious Studies and BBA in Accounting. Her Twitter handle is @C31R3.

Dr. Fen Kennedy is an Assistant Professor of Dance at the University of Alabama. Their research - theoretical and physical - focusses on how dance can articulate the norms and values of a society, and how those norms can be challenged and changed. Their work has been featured in Dance Chronicle, the Journal of Dance Education, the Activist History Review and is forthcoming in several anthologies. Their latest dance work Pressure, commissioned in collaboration with Melissa Yes for the Alabama Repertory Dace Theatre, explored stressors on the lives of young women during the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic. In their spare time Fen teaches and organizes gender-friendly social partner dancing around the US.

Merle Eisenberg is a postdoctoral fellow at the National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center (SESYNC) at the University of Maryland and received a PhD in history from Princeton University. He has published articles in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Historical Review, and Past & Present among other venues. He co-founded and is co-editor of the Middle Ages for Educators that is designed for teachers, students, and members of the public who want to learn about Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages. He received a grant from the LePage Center for his weekly podcast, Infectious Historians that discusses historical pandemics and diseases while also discussing some pressing questions today.

Monica H. Green is an independent scholar specializing on the history of medicine in the Middle Ages. Although trained as a Europeanist, she has long recognized the intimate ties between Europe and the Islamic world, both of which suffered from the devastations of plague both in the early Middle Ages and again at the end of the medieval period. That work led her to explore the significance of new findings from genetics, which tells a story of plague's effects well beyond the confines of Europe. She is currently working on two books: a history of the medical translations of the 11th-century monk, Constantine the African; and The Black Death: A Global History, which looks at the spread of plague throughout Eurasia and Africa.

Tunahan Durmaz is a first-year Ph.D. researcher in the Department of History and Civilization at the European University Institute, Florence. His research mainly focuses on Ottoman history with a special interest in social and cultural aspects of diseases. He specifically studies how urban communities of the Ottoman Empire, and the world around them, perceived the concept of disease in the seventeenth century and if/how their perceptions changed over time. Durmaz earned his M.A. degree at Sabanci University (Istanbul) in 2019 with his thesis titled “Family, Companions, and Death: Seyyid Hasan Nûrî Efendi’s Microcosm (1661-1665)”. 

Emily Drabinski is interim chief librarian at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. She took on this role effective March 15th. The library building closed on March 13th. Prior to joining the Graduate Center, Drabinski spent ten years at Long Island University, Brooklyn as a teaching librarian and union activist. She edits Gender & Sexuality in Information Studies, a book series from Library Juice Press/Litwin Books.

Melanie Meyers is the Director of Collections and Engagement at The American Jewish Historical Society. Prior to joining AJHS in 2018, she was the Senior Manager for Reference and Outreach at The Center for Jewish History, New York City. She is an instructor at The Palmer School of Library and Information Science, Long Island University, where she teaches a variety of classes for the special collections/rare books specialization, including “Special Collections Librarianship” and “History of the Book”. 

John H. Pollack is Curator, Research Services, in the Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts at the University of Pennsylvania Libraries. He has worked in this department since 1995. His responsibilities include providing assistance to students and scholars, and teaching and organizing class sessions centered on the collections. John holds a PhD in English from Penn. He specializes in Early American literature and history, and early modern book history. His research has focused on topics including Native American languages and Benjamin Franklin and colonial education.

Jaime Taylor is the Discovery and Resource Management Systems Coordinator at UMass Amherst. During the pandemic she has been both keeping library catalog and search systems live for remote teaching, learning, and research; and working on the Five College Consortium’s implementation of FOLIO, an open source library services platform. She is currently working on a book chapter about project management in consortia; her professional interests include organized labor, anti-racism work, library instruction from a systems and technical services perspective, and flattening managerial hierarchies more than is currently fashionable.

Chrissy Yee Lau is an Assistant Professor of History at California State University Monterey Bay. She writes histories on race, gender, religion, and empire. She has published her research in the anthology Gendering the Trans-Pacific World and a special issue on Asian American Public History in the journal Southern California Quarterly. She has also researched and developed museum exhibitions for the public and digital exhibitions in the classroom.

Preeti Sharma is an Assistant Professor of American Studies at California State University, Long Beach. Her writing on race, gender, and labor have appeared in The Journal of Asian American Studies. She has supported numerous research justice and storytelling efforts, including with the UCLA Labor Center. She is also co-lead author of the first national study on labor issues in the nail salon sector.

Travis N. Rieder, PhD, is a bioethicist, philosopher and author, currently serving as Director of the Master of Bioethics degree program and a Research Scholar at the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics. He also has secondary appointments in the Departments of Philosophy and Health Policy & Management, as well as in the Center for Public Health Advocacy.

In recent years virtually all of his attention has turned to the ethical and policy issues raised by pain, opioids, and America’s problem with the two.  In 2019, Travis published In Pain: A Bioethicist’s Personal Struggle with Opioids, in which he combines narrative from his own experience as a pain and opioid therapy patient with his expertise in philosophy and bioethics to identify, explain, and attempt to solve some of the most profound questions raised by pain and addiction medicine.

Fiona Anciano is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Studies at the University of the Western Cape, South Africa. She is a qualitative researcher with an interest in urban governance, democratisation and civil society. She conducts research in informal settlements on urban democracy and informality.  In 2020 she ran the lockdowndiaries project (www.lockdowndiaries.org) reflecting on the impact of Covid-19 regulations on residents in Cape Town. She has produced numerous publications including book chapters and journal articles, most recently a co-authored book Democracy Disconnected: Participation and Governance in a City of the South, published by Routledge, UK in 2019. She is also co-editor of a forthcoming collection, published by Routledge titled Political Values and Narratives of Resistance: Social Justice and the Fractured Promises of Post-colonial States.

Justin Meyer is associate professor of biology at UC San Diuego.  He received his Ph.D. from Michigan State University and was a Systems Biology Departmental Fellow at Harvard Medical School, where he was awarded the James S. McDonnell Foundation Fellowship for Studying Complex Systems. He joined the faculty of Ecology Behavior and Evolution and the Quantitative Biology Initiative in 2014.  His lab studies changes to viral genomes which allow them to infect new species--And, the natural processes – mutation, recombination, and natural selection – that permit their evolution.

Kate Starbird is an Associate Professor at the Department of Human Centered Design & Engineering (HCDE) at the University of Washington (UW). Kate’s research is situated within human-computer interaction and the emerging field of crisis informatics—the study of the how social media and other information-communication technologies are used during crisis events. Currently, her work focuses on the production and spread of online rumors, misinformation, and disinformation in the context of crisis events. Starbird is a co-founder of the UW Center for an Informed Public.

Amanda Latimore is a social epidemiologist that focuses on overdose and addiction policies, practices, and programs. Dr. Latimore is the Director of the Center for Addiction Research and Effective Solutions (CARES) at American Institutes for Research and adjunct faculty at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

Dr. Zaneta Marie Thayer is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Dartmouth College. She earned her PhD at Northwestern University and is the 2020 recipient of the Michael A. Little Early Career Award from the Human Biology Association. Her research addresses how early life environments, including those experienced during pregnancy, affect health. In April 2020, she launched the COVID-19 and Reproductive Effects (CARE) study to understand the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on stress and maternity care experiences among pregnant persons living in the US.

Nicole Schroeder is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Virginia and a current Dolores Liebmann Fund Fellow. In 2018-19 she held the Friends of the APS Predoctoral Fellowship in Early American History (to 1840) at the American Philosophical Society and from 2019-2020 she held the Program in Early American Economy and Society Predoctoral Fellowship at the Library Company of Philadelphia. Nicole studies the history of disability, welfare, and medicine in early America. 

Andrew Seaton is a Ph.D. candidate in history at New York University. His dissertation explores the relationship between politics, society, and universal health care through a transnational history of the British National Health Service (NHS). Andrew argues that this pivotal postwar institution demonstrates overlooked endurances to social democratic structures and political cultures. This interpretation challenges historical narratives that map the rising hegemony of late twentieth-century neoliberalism. His research scales from the everyday work that embedded communitarian ideals in hospital wards and health centers across Britain, to the NHS's wider significance in trans-Atlantic discussions about health reform, processes of decolonization, and the movement of medical professionals across borders. Andrew has published articles in Twentieth Century British History and the Bulletin of the History of Medicine.

Joanna Radin is a historian of life and human sciences at Yale University, where she is Associate Professor of History of Medicine and a core member of the Program in History of Science & Medicine. There, she is also affiliated with the Departments of History, Anthropology, and American Studies as well as the Programs in Ethnicity, Race & Migration and Religion & Modernity. She is the author of the book Life on Ice: A History of New Uses for Cold Blood (Chicago 2017) and co-editor (with Emma Kowal) of Cryopolitics: Freezing Life in a Melting World (MIT 2017). In addition to numerous academic journals, her writing has also appeared in the Washington Post, Los Angeles Review of Books and The New Inquiry. She is currently at work on a book, tentatively titled, Surreal Science: Michael Crichton, Mass Media and the Manipulation of Modern Life. Radin is co-editor (with Adrian Johns) of the Science as Culture series at University of Chicago Press.

Robin Wolfe Scheffler is an Associate Professor in the Program in Science, Technology, and Society at MIT. His first book, A Contagious Cause:The American Hunt for Cancer Viruses and the Rise of Molecular Medicine (University of Chicago Press, 2019) examined the century-long effort to identify a human cancer virus and develop a vaccine. His current research, supported by the National Science Foundation focuses on the history of the biotechnology industry in the Greater Boston Area.

Adrianna Link is the Head of Scholarly Programs at the American Philosophical Society. She received her Ph.D. from the Department of History of Science and Technology at The Johns Hopkins University in 2016, where she specialized in the history of 20th c. American anthropology.  She is currently preparing a book manuscript on the history of "urgent anthropology" at the Smithsonian Institution

Lisa Browar was appointed President of the Linda Hall Library of Science, Engineering and Technology in July 2008.  Prior to accepting this position, she was University Librarian at The New School in New York City from 2002 until 2008.  Lisa previously served as the Brooke Russell Astor Chief Librarian for Rare Books and Manuscripts at The New York Public Library.

Ana Santos Rutschman has been assistant professor at Saint Louis University School of Law since 2018. She focuses on topics related to health law, innovation in the life sciences, intellectual property, and law and technology. At SLU, she teaches FDA Law and Policy, the seminar Emerging Health Technologies: Vaccine Law and Policy, Patent Law and Property. 

Her legal scholarship has appeared or is forthcoming in UCLA Law Review, Emory Law Journal, Yale Law Journal Forum, Michigan Law Review Online among other venues.   Her commentary pieces have been published by the Saint Louis Post-Dispatch, Health Affairs Blog, the Huffington Post and The Conversation.  Her forthcoming book, Vaccines as Technology: Innovation, Barriers and the Public Interest with Cambridge University Press is scheduled to be published in 2022.

She has worked as a consultant to the World Health Organization in 2015-2016 during the Ebola and Zika outbreaks.

Dr. Katie Foss is a Media Studies professor in the School of Journalism & Strategic Media at Middle Tennessee University, where she teaches courses in media literacy, health communication, and gender studies.

She is the author of Constructing the Outbreak: Epidemics in Media and Collective Memory, Breastfeeding and Media: Exploring Conflicting Discourses That Threaten Public Health, and Television and Health Responsibility in an Age of Individualism. Foss edited The Graduate Student Guidebook: From Orientation to Tenure Track, Beyond Princess Culture: Gender and Children’s Marketing, and Demystifying the Big House: Exploring Prison Experience and Media Representations. 

Dr. Esther Chernak.  Esther  is a professor in the Department of Environmental Health, Drexel University School of Public Health, and has a position in the Drexel University College of Medicine. She is the director of the Center for Public Health Readiness and Communication at Drexel. Prior to joining the Drexel faculty in 2010, Dr. Chernak worked at the Philadelphia Department of Public Health for over 25 years.

James Dodd is a Consultant Senior Lecturer in Respiratory Medicine at the Academic Respiratory Unit, University of Bristol, UK. His research focuses on the multi-system impact of lung disease and he is currently undertaking neuroimaging studies of brain pathology and cognitive function in patients with COPD. His clinical work is at Southmead Hospital, Bristol, where he has responsibility for the care of patients with complex COPD and asthma.

Sandra Eder is an assistant professor in the history department at the University of California, Berkeley, where she teaches U.S. gender history and the history of medicine. Her research focuses on gender, sexuality, and race in medicine and science, clinical practices and patient records, and the science of happiness. She has a book forthcoming on the emergence of the sex/gender binary in mid-twentieth-century American medicine. She is co-editor (with Elena Conis and Aimee Medeiros) of “Pink and Blue: Gender, Culture, and the Health of Children” which deploys gender—often in concert with class and race—as the central critical lens for understanding the function of pediatrics as a cultural and social project in modern U.S. history (Rutgers University Press in May 2021).

Dr. Cindy Ermus (@CindyErmus) is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Texas at San Antonio. She teaches courses on the history of disease and disasters, early modern Europe, and the Age of Revolutions. She has published on catastrophe and crisis management in eighteenth-century Europe and the Atlantic, and she is the editor of a volume titled Environmental Disaster in the Gulf South: Two Centuries of Catastrophe, Risk and Resilience (LSU Press 2018). Her current book project is a transnational study of the Plague of Provence of 1720 (“Great Plague of Marseille”), one of the last outbreaks of plague in Western Europe. She is also co-founder, executive editor, and contributor for the digital academic publication, Age of Revolutions (www.ageofrevolutions.com; on Twitter @AgeofRevs). 

Tiago Saraiva is Associate Professor of History at Drexel University, coeditor with Amy Slaton of the journal History and Technology, and author of Fascist Pigs: Technoscientific Organisms and the History of Fascism (2016). He has been a Research fellow at the Institute of Social Sciences of the University of Lisbon as well as visiting professor at UCLA and UC Berkeley. He is currently studying the significance of cloning Californian oranges for the history of racial capitalism in the United States, South Africa, Algeria, Palestine, and Brazil, and completing Moving Crops and the Scales of History, a collective manuscript with multiple co-authors.

Deborah Levine is a scholar in the areas of the history of medicine, health, patient experience, health insurance, and disease at Providence College. She regularly presents at national and international conferences. In addition, her work often appears in scholarly journals, and her expertise has been sought by media outlets that include The Washington Post, The New York Times, and CBS Evening News.  

Jacob Steere-Williams is a historian of epidemic disease and public health, and an Associate Professor at the College of Charleston. He is the author of the recently published book, The Filth Disease: Typhoid Fever and the Practices of Epidemiology in Victorian England, with the University of Rochester Press. Jacob has been active during the COVID-19 pandemic in engaging in public scholarship, writing op-eds in local and national media outlets, giving public lectures, and organizing a oral history project in Charleston.

Virginia Heffernan is an accomplished journalist and cultural critic—she is a regular contributor to The New York Times, as well as The Wall Street Journal, Mother Jones, and Politico.  She writes a regular column for Wired Magazine and the LA Times—and she is co-host of the Trumpcast on Slate.  She is also the author of Magic and Loss: The Internet as Art (2016) with Simon and Schuster.

TODAY AT NOON Joseph R. Biden became the 46th President of the United States.  COVID-19 is certainly a global pandemic, with a story to be told of every nation, and across/beyond nations--but in the United States the suffering and loss of life is bound up with the failures of the Trump Administration, failures of Donald Trump himself, personally—failure to plan for disaster, react seriously, tell the truth, not spread lies and disinformation, not divide the public along lines of ideology/age/race/region—the manifest failure of now former President Trump to take seriously his duties, or to even show common decency or modesty when presented his deadly failings. 

And so with the transition of power to President Biden, I (and many others) are trying to lay aside our anger.  I’m marking the day with some hope, a measured hope given the suffering and dying of so many, but hope nonetheless that the United States federal government can change course, help bend the curve, deliver and administer vaccine, and facilitate a recovery and memorial process that we desperately need.

I’d like to quote Biden’s inaugural address: “Few people in our nation's history have been more challenged or found a time more challenging or difficult than the time we're in now. Once-in-a-century virus that silently stalks the country. It's taken as many lives in one year as America lost in all of World War II. Millions of jobs have been lost. Hundreds of thousands of businesses closed. A cry for racial justice, some four hundred years in the making moves us. The dream of justice for all will be deferred no longer.  And my first act as president, I’d like to ask you to join me in a moment of silent prayer to remember all those who we lost this past year to the pandemic. Those four hundred thousand fellow Americans, moms, dads, husbands, wives, sons, daughters, friends, neighbors and coworkers. We will honor them by becoming the people and the nation we know we can and should be. So I ask you, let's say a silent prayer for those who've lost their lives, those left behind and for our country.”

In that mindset I’ve asked 5 guests to join COVIDCalls today for a memorial session.  Each will come on in turn, read an obituary and discuss why they chose that life to honor.  Thanks for joining us today.

Zachary Loeb is a PhD candidate in the History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania. He works at the intersection of the history of technology and the history of disasters. Zachary's research explores the belief that humanity's romance with techno-science will lead to the end of the world--he works on the history of computing, the history of critiques (and critics) of techno-science, as well as on prophecies of doom and those who are described (rightly or wrongly) as prophets of doom. He is writing a dissertation on the year 2000 computing crisis, better known as Y2K.

Dr. Carla Keirns is assistant professor of Medical Ethics and Internal Medicine at the University of Kansas in Kansas City, Kansas. She has published in the history, sociology and ethics of medicine, and has been treating patients the past year through the COVID-19 pandemic, both those with COVID and whose care looks very different because of it. Her father-in-law died of COVID-19 in April, so this issue is personal for her. 

Alisha Rankin is Associate Professor of History at Tufts University. She has published widely on the early history of pharmaceuticals and medical experiments, and she co-led the working group “Testing Drugs and Trying Cures in the Pre-Modern World," at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. She has a Ph.D. in the History of Science from Harvard University, and she was a postdoctoral fellow at Trinity College, University of Cambridge. Her latest book, The Poison Trials: Wonder Drugs, Experiment, and the Battle for Authority in Renaissance Science, just came out with the University of Chicago Press. 

Jake Auchincloss represents the 4th district of MA in the US House of Representatives.  He was born and raised in Newton, Massachusetts, the son of a surgeon and scientist. From the moment he could read, Jake loved American history.

After graduating from Harvard College, Rep. Auchincloss joined the Marines. He commanded infantry in Afghanistan and special operations in Panama. He's now a major in the reserves.

He won election to the Newton City Council in 2015 and topped the ticket in 2019. His favorite part of being a city councilor was constituent services and communication.  He chaired the transportation & public safety committee and was a member of the land use committee. While serving as a city councilor on nights and weekends, he managed teams at both a Fortune 100 and a startup. He led product development in cybersecurity and insurance. He has degrees in economics and finance from Harvard College and MIT Sloan.

Rep. Auchincloss lives in Newtonville with his wife, Michelle; their son, Teddy; and their Labrador Retriever, Donut.

U.S. Senator Bob Casey fights every day for Pennsylvania families. He is a strong advocate for policies that improve the health care and early learning of children and policies that will raise wages for the middle class. Senator Casey serves on four committees including the Senate Finance Committee and Senate HELP Committee. He is also the highest ranking Democrat on the Special Committee on Aging, where his agenda is focused on policies that support seniors and individuals with disabilities. Senator Casey and his wife Terese live in Scranton and have four adult daughters.

Maya Goldenberg is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Guelph (pronounced Gwelf) in Canada. She works in philosophy of medicine and has a new book on vaccine hesitancy coming out in March 2021. _Vaccine Hesitancy: Public Trust, Expertise, and the War on Science’_ is published by University of Pittsburgh Press.

Tara Haelle is a freelance science journalist and photojournalist who serves as the AHCJ Core Topic Leader for Medical Studies. She particularly specializes in reporting on vaccines, pediatrics, maternal health, obesity, nutrition, mental health and medical research in general, and she regularly speaks on vaccine hesitancy. Her work has appeared in Elemental, Scientific American, New York Times, Forbes, Politico, Slate, NOVA, Wired and Science, and she writes and covers medical conferences regularly for Medscape and MDEdge. She co-authored an evidence-based parenting book, "The Informed Parent," and authored "Vaccination Investigation: The History and Science of Vaccines," along with a dozen children's science books.

Chrissy Houlahan is an Air Force veteran, an engineer, a serial entrepreneur, an educator, and a nonprofit leader. She’s in her second term representing Pennsylvania’s 6th Congressional District, which encompasses Chester County and southern Berks County. She serves on the House Armed Services Committee, the House Foreign Affairs Committee, and the House Small Business Committee.

Julian Zelizer is the Malcolm Stevenson Forbes, Class of 1941 Professor of History and Public Affairs, Woodrow Wilson School, Princeton University.  He is the author and editor of 19 books on American political history, including Governing America: The Revival of Political History and The Fierce Urgency of Now: Lyndon Johnson, Congress, and the Battle for the Great Society. Most recently, he co-authored with Kevin Kruse, Fault Lines: A History of the United States Since 1974.  He has published over nine hundred op-eds, including his weekly column on CNN.Com.  

Dorit Rubinstein Reiss is a professor of law at the University of California, Hastings College of the Law. Increasingly, her research and activities are focused on legal issues related to vaccines, including exemption laws and tort liability related to non-vaccination. She published law review and peer reviewed articles and many blog posts on legal issues related to vaccines. 

She received an undergraduate degree in Law and Political Science (1999, Magna cum Laude) from the Faculty of Law in the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She received her Ph.D. from the Jurisprudence and Social Policy program in UC Berkeley. 

She is a member of the Parents Advisory Board of Voices for Vaccines and the the Vaccine Working Group on Ethics and Policy, and active in vaccine advocacy in other ways.

Ross D. Silverman, JD, MPH, is Professor of Health Policy and Management at the Indiana University Richard M. Fairbanks School of Public Health and Professor of Public Health and Law at the Indiana University Robert H. McKinney School of Law in Indianapolis. He is a member of the IU Centers on Health Policy and Bioethics. His recent vaccine- and pandemic-related work has appeared in such peer-reviewed publications as the New England Journal of Medicine, BMJ, JAMA, JAMA-Pediatrics, the Hastings Center Report, and the Journal of Law, Medicine, and Ethics. He serves as a member of the Covid-19 Vaccine Allocation advisory committee for the Indiana State Health Department, and is an Associate Editor for the journal Public Health Reports, the official journal of the U.S. Surgeon General and the U.S. Public Health Service.

Peter Hotez MD Ph.D. is professor of pediatrics and molecular virology at Baylor College of Medicine, where he is also co-director of the Texas Children’s Center for Vaccine Development and Endowed Chair in Tropical Pediatrics. He is a vaccine scientist who led the development of vaccines to prevent and treat neglected tropical diseases and coronavirus infections. A new Texas Children’s COVID19 vaccine is being accelerated in India now undergoing clinical testing.

Prof. Hotez obtained his undergraduate degree from Yale University and his MD and Ph.D. from Weil Cornell Medical College and Rockefeller University. He is the author of more than 550 scientific articles indexed on PubMed, and 4 single-author books. He is an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine and American Academy of Arts & Sciences, and has been honored by PAHO/WHO, Research America, B’nai Brith, American Society of Tropical Medicine & Hygiene, and other organizations. He appears frequently on major news outlets promoting global health, and vaccines and immunizations, countering antivaccine and Antiscience movements.

Dr. Jaime Anne Earnest is the Senior Researcher for Assessment, Monitoring, and Evaluation at the US Department of Defense's Center for Global Health Engagement, and is an Assistant Professor in Preventative Medicine and Biostatistics at Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences. She has served as a Branch Chief in the Office of the Director of the National Institutes of Mental Health, a program evaluation translational scientist and strategist at Headquarters, Department of the Army at the Pentagon, an evaluation methodologist at Army Public Health Center, and a senior health administration fellow at the National Vaccine Program Office, Office of the Secretary of Health of the Department of Health and Human Services. There, she supported multiple National Vaccine Advisory Committees and coordinated the National Vaccine Advisory Committee's Vaccine Confidence Working Group. She received her PhD in Infectious Disease Epidemiology and Public Health Policy from the University of Glasgow as a Lord Kelvin/Adam Smith Scholar, and her Master of Public Health in Health Management and Policy from Drexel University. She is a Medical Reserve Corps field epidemiologist volunteer who conducts contact tracing, testing, and vaccination clinics in her spare time.

Today I have on my father Steve Knowles, a fourth generation Texan, who was born and raised in Odessa, Texas, which is the hub of the oil industry in the Permian Basin of West Texas and Eastern New Mexico. Steve received his BBA degree in marketing from the University of Texas at Austin and his MBA from the University of Texas at Permian Basin. He earned his Professional in Human Resources Management certification and was an active member of the Society for Human Resource Management and the American Society for Training and Development. His career was essentially as a Human Resources professional that included stints with retail, manufacturing, health care, oil field services and banking over 40 plus years. Steve is a past president of the Austin Human Resource Management Association and a past vice chair of the Austin Human Rights Commission.

He retired from the Farm Credit Bank of Texas as the Vice President of Human Resource Management for this multi-billion dollar cooperative banking operation based in Austin, Texas with offices in Texas, New Mexico, Louisiana, Alabama, and Mississippi.

Prior to retirement, Steve and his wife, Harriet, relocated to the Sun City community inside the city limits of Georgetown, Texas. He has five children, five grandchildren (and another one on the way). He plays golf, reads, walks, and focuses on staying linked with family and friends throughout the pandemic. He is an avid Texas Longhorns’ fan.

Heather Schulte is an interdisciplinary artist in Boulder, CO. Her work combines analog textile materials and techniques with digital material and design processes, analyzing the intersection of personal and public forms of language and communication. She received her BFA from the University of NE-Lincoln in 2003. She has exhibited at numerous galleries and contemporary art spaces, including RedLine Contemporary Art Center in Denver and Woman Made Gallery in Chicago, IL. Her work has been featured in publications such as, "Fiber Art Now," and the "Surface Design Journal."

Ed Yong is a science journalist who reports for The Atlantic, and is based in Washington DC. 

His work appears on The Atlantic's website and its print magazine; it has also featured in National Geographic, the New Yorker, Wired, Nature, New Scientist, Scientific American, and many more. He has won several awards, including the Victor Cohn Prize for medical science reporting, the Neil and Susan Sheehan Award for investigative journalism, and a AAAS Kavli Science Journalism Award for in-depth reporting in 2020 among many others.  He regularly does talks and interviews, and his TED talk on mind-controlling parasites has been watched by over 1.5 million people. 

I CONTAIN MULTITUDES, his first book, looks at the amazing partnerships between animals and microbes. Published in 2016, it became a New York Times bestseller, and was listed in best-of-2016 lists by the NYT, NPR, the Economist, the Guardian, and several others. His second book, AN IMMENSE WORLD, will look at the extraordinary sensory worlds of other animals.

Tim Carman is a James Beard Award-winning food writer and columnist for The Washington Post. His work has appeared in numerous editions of the “Best Food Writing” collections. He has also written for Imbibe magazine, American Scholar, Food Network magazine and other publications. Before joining The Post in 2010, he served as food editor and columnist for Washington City Paper. He lives in Hyattsville, Md., with his wife, the writer M. Carrie Allan, and their two dogs, Lucinda and Hans Floofer.

Marie Flannery is the President and CEO of The Fair Housing Center, and since joining the organization in October 2018 she has been actively engaged with community efforts in the Toledo area, serving on the Housing First Core Leadership Team and Homelessness Board and participating as a member of the United Pastors for Social Empowerment (UPSE) and Interdenominational Ministerial Alliance (IMA). Previously she was with Inland Fair Housing and Mediation Board (IFHMB), located in Southern California, since 2012 President/CEO since July 2016.

Mel Jones is a Research Scientist and Associate Director of the Virginia Center for Housing Research at Virginia Tech.  She leads housing studies and housing research in Virginia and beyond. Mel  specializes in quantitative analysis and data driven policy connecting housing to broad urban issues including economic and community development, individual economic opportunity, and well-being.

Orla McCaffrey covers consumer finance and regional banking for The Wall Street Journal. She previously interned on the Journal’s markets desk. She is a graduate of the State University of New York at Binghamton and has a master’s degree from the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY.

Between 2014 and 2019, she and photographer/historian William Johnston travelled five times to post-nuclear meltdown Fukushima and collaborated on creating A Body in Fukushima, an extensive and expanding project that documents places of nuclear contamination with Eiko’s body. Eiko has presented both photo exhibitions and film screenings of A Body in Fukushima internationally at museums, art centers, and conferences on environmental disasters. 

Also in 2017, she launched a multi-year Duet Project, an open-ended series of cross-disciplinary, cross-cultural and cross-generational experiments with a diverse range of artists both living and dead. David Brick is one of her collaborators of the Duet Project. In January 2020, Eiko travelled to China for a month to work with choreographer Wen Hui, during which the Covid-19 epidemic was identified. Since March, Eiko has been creating works in her Virtual Studio, which archives her art making and public conversations in the time of the pandemic.

Eiko has been honored with a MacArthur Fellowship, the Samuel H. Scripps American Dance Festival Award, and the first Doris Duke Artist Award. For her solo work, she has received a Bessies Special Citation, an Art Matters Fellowship, the Anonymous Was a Woman Award, and the Sam Miller Award for Performing Arts. Eiko teaches interdisciplinary college courses about the atomic bombings and other environmental issues at Wesleyan University, New York University, Colorado College, and Tokyo University. During the 2017–2018 academic year, Eiko was a Think Tank Fellow in Wesleyan’s College of the Environment. 

David Brick co-founded Philadelphia’s Headlong Dance Theater with Amy Smith and Andrew Simonet in 1993. Over the next two decades, these three co-founders created over forty dances as Headlong, performing nationally and internationally.

In 2008, David co-founded the Headlong Performance Institute, a training program for creating experimental performance.

David collaborates broadly in creating performance, participatory events, and community. His experience of growing up as a hearing member of a Deaf family continually influences David’s understanding of human bodies as active manifestations of culture. His recent work includes a residency at Dance Place in Washington DC to work on Island of Signs—a performance that explored growing up in a family with two languages, one that was shared and one that was not. He shared this residence with Carolyn Brick, his 78-year old Deaf mother who attended nearby Gallaudet University and was featured in a 1959 documentary about her experience there.

Asante Haughton has emerged as a leader in mental health. Asante has presented across the globe, including a pair of TEDx talks telling stories detailing the impact of family trauma on mental health. Through his work, Asante was also named as a CAMH 150 Difference Maker, being awarded the distinction of being one of the top 150 difference makers in Canadian mental health. Since 2019 as the host of Cypher (www.storiesforcaregivers.com), a web show that takes caregiving stories and turns them into songs, Asante has been interviewing loved ones supporting loved ones to spotlight the healing power of connection. In addition, Asante has rediscovered his love of writing, becoming a contributing editor to Inspire Magazine (www.kbiinspires.com), a wellness resource for youth. Most recently, Asante has co-founded the Reach Out Response Network (reachouttoronto.ca), an advocacy organization currently working with the City of Toronto to usher in transformative crisis response reform.

Erica Earl is an active duty U.S. Army service member specializing in public affairs. She currently works as a reporter at Stars and Stripes in Tokyo, her recent reporting has been on how the coronavirus has impacted the military. 

Shondiin Silversmith is a Diné journalist working as the Indigenous Affairs Reporter for The Arizona Republic, which is part of the USA Today network. She has a master’s degree in journalism from Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts with nearly 10 years of journalism experience mostly covering Indigenous Communities. She previously worked for The Navajo Times and has held various internships over the years including PRI’s The World and The GroundTruth Project. 

Shobita Parthasarathy is Professor of Public Policy and Director of Science, Technology, and Public Policy at the University of Michigan. Her research specializes in the governance of emerging science and technology, and the politics of evidence and expertise in policymaking in comparative and international perspective. She is the author of two books--Patent Politics: Life Forms, Markets, and the Public Interest in the United States and Europe (University of Chicago Press. 2017) and Building Genetic Medicine: Breast Cancer, Technology, and the Comparative Politics of Health Care (MIT Press, 2007). She is currently working on two projects. The first examines the politics of inclusive innovation in international development, and the second compares COVID-19 responses (particularly as it relates to diagnostic testing) in the United States, United Kingdom, Singapore, and South Korea.