Award-winning journalist Laurie Garrett, one of America's premier authorities on healthcare and disease prevention, is set to speak at the Center for the Arts Thursday night as the next installment in this year's Distinguished Speakers series.
Garrett is the only person to ever win all three of the most elite awards in American journalism - the Peabody, the Polk and the Pulitzer - and is headlining as the only female speaker in this year's six-speaker series.
"We are definitely looking forward to this event," said Jun Xu, a Ph.D. candidate in economics and the president of the Graduate Student Association, the upcoming lecture's sponsor.
An expert on global health with a particular focus on newly emerging and re-emerging diseases, Garrett will address pressing issues like global healthcare, disease prevention and bioterrorism.
"I think she'll be talking a lot about things that'll scare us a little bit," said William Regan, director of the Office of Special Events at UB.
Garrett is most recently known for her two best-selling books, "The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance and Betrayal of Trust" and "The Collapse of Global Public Health," which deal with issues including racial discrepancies in public health, growing antibiotic-resistant diseases and bioterrorism.
She has also written for many publications, including "Foreign Affairs," "Esquire," "Vanity Fair," "The Los Angeles Times," "The Washington Post" and "Current Issues in Public Health."
She has also appeared on "ABC Nightline," "The Jim Lerher NewsHour," "The Charlie Rose Show," "The Oprah Winfrey Show," "Dateline" and numerous programs on CNN.
Garrett graduated with honors in biology from the University of California, Santa Cruz. She attended graduate school in the Department of Bacteriology and Immunology at UC Berkeley. She also did research at Stanford University and graduated with two Ph.D.s from Wesleyan Illinois University and the University of Massachusetts.
"We have been dancing with the devil for quite some time in our complacency about infectious diseases and the shifts occurring in our microbial environment," Garrett said on her Web site.
"We live in a microbial suite. Humans have a hard time imagining that they are just one piece of a general ecology in which they live and that they are in fact food for literally millions of microbes," her site continues. "One of our biggest health public crises is antibiotic-resistant bacteria and we are seeing this to be a problem all over the world. What we're watching die is not just people, but entire cultures, poof, are disappearing in front of our eyes."
Garrett will be speaking at 8 p.m. on Thursday night. Free tickets are available to undergraduates in the Student Association office at 350 Student Union and to graduate students in the Graduate Student Association office at 310 Student Union.
