Disciplines in Dialogue: Disease

JOHN HOPKINS UNIVERSITY, MICROBIOLOGY AND IMMUNOLOGY

Clive Shiff, Ph.D. My work on malaria has always been in the field, my role as Deputy Director of the Blair Research Laboratory in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) was to coordinate monitoring and planning of the country–wide vector control intervention, as well as collecting and reporting on the epidemiological data collected. The program was essentially successful until the late 1990’s. From 1989 to 1995 I ran a study of the use of insecticide treated bed nets in Tanzania funded by the US Agency for International Development and gained considerable knowledge on the role of this technology and on the impact of malaria in communities. It also revealed weaknesses in the overall understanding of P. falciparum epidemiology. During this work, I was the first person to carry out field studies on the Becton Dickson new Malaria Rapid Diagnostic test. RDT now is the basic method of diagnosis in most anti malaria programs. Currently my interest has focused on improved diagnostics for neglected tropical diseases. This work commenced with detection of parasite specific DNA of Plasmodium falciparum in urine with colleagues in Zambia.

COLBY COLLEGE, HISTORY

Jim Webb, Professor Emeritus of History at Colby College, conducts research on the history of disease. He is the founding editor at the Ohio University Press of Perspectives on Global Health and the Series in Ecology and History. He has been awarded grants from the Wellcome Trust, the U.S. National Institutes of Health, and the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. He has held recent fellowships at the Rachel Carson Center at the Ludwig-Maximilians Universität (LMU) in Munich, Germany (2017), the Center for the Global History of Development at the University of Shanghai (2018), and as a Fulbright Professor at the University of Botswana (2018-2019). His recent books include The Guts of the Matter: A Global History of Human Waste and Infectious Intestinal Disease (Cambridge University Press, 2020), The Long Struggle Against Malaria in Tropical Africa (Cambridge University Press, 2014) and Humanity’s Burden: A Global History of Malaria (Cambridge University Press, 2009).

JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY, INTERNATIONAL HEALTH

Dr. Nina Martin is an expert in science communication and solving real world problems with data. She works as an Associate Faculty in the Department of International Health at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health (JHSPH) and is an elected member of the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Disparities Solutions. While her PhD is in Molecular Microbiology and Immunology (JHSPH ’17), her research and practice focuses on helping scientists tell better stories with their data through cool visualizations, digital tools like smartphone apps and artificial intelligence-powered chatbots and data dashboards. Her work supports many scientific and public health fields, for example, nutrition and food security, infectious diseases and vaccines, and emergency preparedness and response. She was advised at Colby College by Dr. James Webb, where they shared a love of the history of human impact on the environment and human health.