Join Smithsonian curator, author, and biological anthropologist Sabrina Sholts at 2:00pm on Tuesday, February 4 for a virtual discussion centered around how being human increases one's pandemic risks.
Sholts’s book, The Human Disease: How We Create Pandemics, From Our Bodies to Our Beliefs, travels through history and around the globe to examine how and why pandemics are an inescapable threat of our own making.
Though the COVID-19 pandemic looms large, it is just one of the many infectious disease events explored in The Human Disease. 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, Sholts identifies the human traits and tendencies that double as pandemic liabilities, from the anatomy that defines us to the misperceptions that divide us.
Sholts is a biological anthropologist and curator of biological anthropology at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History (NMNH) who has also served as lead curator of the exhibition Outbreak: Epidemics in a Connected World at the NMNH (2018-2022) and as a scientific advisor for the related exhibition Épidémies: Prendre soin du vivant at the musée des Confluences in Lyon, France (2024-2025). Sholts, who was named World Economic Forum Young Scientist in 2019, has been published in various 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. |
