Symposium participants 2015

Kevin M. Folta

Kevin M. Folta
Kevin M. Folta
Kevin M. Folta, Ph.D., is a Professor and the Chairman of the Horticultural Sciences Department at the University of Florida. His laboratory examines fundamental light signal transduction and its application to control plant growth, metabolism and development, with focus on high-value crop traits. His group also uses state-of-the-art genomics approaches to identify novel genes that control important traits (such as flavor and disease resistance) in small fruits, and led the strawberry genome sequencing project in 2010. He has been recognized with several awards, including the NSF CAREER Award, the University of Florida Research Professorship, and the HHMI Distinguished Mentor Award. A key part of his program is communicating science to non-scientific audiences, and training scientists how to perform public outreach in scientific or controversial topics. B.S./M.S. Northern Illinois University 1989/1992, Ph.D. University of Illinois at Chicago, 1998.


Geoffrey Kabat

Geoffrey Kabat
Geoffrey Kabat
Geoffrey Kabat, Ph.D. is an epidemiologist at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine who has studied a wide range of lifestyle, clinical, and environmental exposures in relation to cancer and other chronic diseases. Much of his work has focused on the roles of tobacco, alcohol, diet, hormones, electromagnetic fields, and obesity and other body characteristics in disease. As a practicing epidemiologist, he has had a long-standing interest in how information about health and health risks that is disseminated to the public squares with what the science says. He is the author of Hyping Health Risks: Environmental Hazards in Daily Life and the Science of Epidemiology and writes a regular column for Forbes on the perception and realities of health risks. His forthcoming book is titled Getting Risk Right.


Paul A. Offit

Paul A. Offit
Paul A. Offit
Paul A. Offit, M.D., is the Director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia as well as the Maurice R. Hilleman Professor of Vaccinology and a Professor of Pediatrics at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. He is a recipient of many awards including the J. Edmund Bradley Prize for Excellence in Pediatrics from the University of Maryland Medical School, the Young Investigator Award in Vaccine Development from the Infectious Disease Society of America, and a Research Career Development Award from the National Institutes of Health. He is also the author of six medical narratives: The Cutter Incident: How America’s First Polio Vaccine Led to Today’s Growing Vaccine Crisis (Yale University Press, 2005), Vaccinated: One Man’s Quest to Defeat the World’s Deadliest Diseases (HarperCollins, 2007), for which he won an award from the American Medical Writers Association, Autism’s False Prophets: Bad Science, Risky Medicine, and the Search for a Cure (Columbia University Press, 2008), Deadly Choices: How the Anti-Vaccine Movement Threatens Us All (Basic Books, 2011), which was selected by Kirkus Reviews and Booklist as one of the best non-fiction books of the year, Do You Believe in Magic?: The Sense and Nonsense of Alternative Medicine (HarperCollins, 2013), which won the Robert P. Balles Prize in Critical Thinking from the Center for Skeptical Inquiry and was selected by National Public Radio as one of the best books of 2013, and Bad Faith: When Religious Belief Undermines Modern Medicine (Basic Books, 2015), selected by the New York Times Book Review as an “Editor’s Choice” book in April 2015.


Brian Ward

Brian Ward
Brian Ward
Brian Ward, M.D. is a professor of Infectious Diseases & Microbiology at McGill where he works in the Tropical Diseases Unit and co-directs the McGill Vaccine Study Centre. He has served as chief of the Infectious Diseases Division and Deputy Director of the Research Institute of the McGill University Health Centre. Since late 2010, he has also served as the Medical Officer for Medicago Inc, a company in Quebec City using plants to make vaccines. His research interests include micronutrient-virus interactions, nanoparticle vaccines, parasite diagnostics and HIV transmission.


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