Author Talk: How We Create Pandemics, From Our Bodies to Our Beliefs

Brought to you in partnership with the Library Speakers Consortium.

Join us for this enlightening presentation with Smithsonian curator Sabrina Sholts as she talks about 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.

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).