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How We Create Pandemics, From Our Bodies to Our Beliefs

with Smithsonian Curator Sabrina Sholts

2025-02-04 14:00:00 2025-02-04 15:00:00 America/New_York How We Create Pandemics, From Our Bodies to Our Beliefs Join us for an enlightening presentation with Smithsonian curator Sabrina Sholts, discussing how the very fact of being human increases our pandemic risks—and gives us the power to save ourselves. Virtual - Virtual

Tuesday, February 04
2:00pm - 3:00pm

Add to Calendar 2025-02-04 14:00:00 2025-02-04 15:00:00 America/New_York How We Create Pandemics, From Our Bodies to Our Beliefs Join us for an enlightening presentation with Smithsonian curator Sabrina Sholts, discussing how the very fact of being human increases our pandemic risks—and gives us the power to save ourselves. Virtual - Virtual

Virtual

Virtual

Join us for an enlightening presentation with Smithsonian curator Sabrina Sholts, discussing how the very fact of being human increases our pandemic risks—and gives us the power to save ourselves.

The COVID-19 pandemic won't be our last—because what makes us vulnerable to pandemics also makes us human. That is the uncomfortable but all-too-timely message of The Human Disease: How We Create Pandemics, From Our Bodies to Our Beliefs, which travels through history and around the globe to examine how and why pandemics are an inescapable threat of our own making. Drawing on dozens of disciplines—from medicine, epidemiology, and microbiology to anthropology, sociology, ecology, and neuroscience—as well as a unique expertise in public education about emerging infectious diseases, biological anthropologist Sabrina Sholts identifies the human traits and tendencies that double as pandemic liabilities, from the anatomy that defines us to the misperceptions that divide us.

Weaving together a wealth of personal experiences, scientific findings, and historical stories, Sholts brings dramatic and much-needed clarity to one of the most profound challenges we face as a species. Though the COVID-19 pandemic looms large in Sholts's account, it is, in fact, just one of the many infectious disease events explored in The Human Disease. With its expansive, evolutionary perspective, the book explains how humanity will continue to face new pandemics because humans cause them, by the ways that we are and the things that we do. By recognizing our risks, Sholts suggests, we can take actions to reduce them. When the next pandemic happens, and how bad it becomes, are largely within our highly capable human hands—and will be determined by what we do with our extraordinary human brains. A presentation you don’t want to miss, register now!

About the Author:  Sabrina Sholts is a biological anthropologist and Curator of Biological Anthropology at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History (NMNH). Her research explores intersections of human, animal, and environmental health in the past and present. She received her PhD in Anthropology at UC Santa Barbara and was a postdoctoral researcher at UC Berkeley in Integrative Biology and at Stockholm University in Biophysics and Biochemistry. Sholts has published widely in academic journals including American Journal of Biological Anthropology, Environmental Health Perspectives, JAMA, PNAS, Scientific Reports, Proceedings of the Royal Society B, and Nature Ecology & Evolution, and written for popular audiences in Scientific American and Smithsonian Magazine. She was named as a World Economic Forum Young Scientist in 2019. In addition, she was Lead Curator of the exhibition Outbreak: Epidemics in a Connected World at the NMNH (2018-2022) and a scientific advisor for the related exhibition Épidémies: Prendre soin du vivant at the musée des Confluences in Lyon, France (2024-2025).

This program is sponsored by the Friends of Duncan Library and the Friends of Beatley Central Library.

Upcoming and previously broadcast author talks can be viewed here.

AGE GROUP: | Seniors | Adults |

EVENT TYPE: | Special Event | Author Talks |

TAGS: | Science |

Virtual


Hours
Mon, Feb 10 9:00AM to 8:00PM
Tue, Feb 11 9:00AM to 8:00PM
Wed, Feb 12 9:00AM to 8:00PM
Thu, Feb 13 9:00AM to 8:00PM
Fri, Feb 14 9:00AM to 5:00PM
Sat, Feb 15 9:00AM to 5:00PM
Sun, Feb 16 9:00AM to 5:00PM

About the branch

Upcoming Events

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Tue, Feb 18, 7:00pm - 8:00pm
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Wed, Feb 19, 3:30pm - 5:00pm
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Please join us for an online discussion of a little-known chapter of American history when a Virginia school system refused to integrate after the Brown v. Board of Education decision. Register

Thu, Feb 20, 7:00pm - 8:00pm
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Join us to learn from Beck Mordini, Executive Director of Biodiversity for a Livable Planet, how people are working with nature to reduce climatic change. Register

Thu, Feb 20, 7:00pm - 8:30pm
Zoom
Join us on Zoom the third Thursday of each month! We are discussing selections from "The 7 Deadly Sins Sampler", a Great Books Foundation Anthology. Click on the event title for more info! Register