Program Series: Health and Wellness
Heath & Wellness (HW) Series includes programs that present current and emerging public health concerns by introducing the latest research advances in medical science, disease prevention and physical and mental health.
Previous HW events have covered cancer, aging, addiction, Alzheimer’s disease, human microbiome, and dietary supplements.
Distinguished speakers have included Frank Giles, M.D., Chief of Oncology at the Lurie Children’s Hospital; Jack A. Gilbert, Ph.D., Director of the Microbiome Center and a Professor of Surgery at the University of Chicago, Group Leader for Microbial Ecology at Argonne National Laboratory, Associate Director of the Institute of Genomic and Systems Biology, Research Associate at the Field Museum of Natural History, and Senior Scientist at the Marine Biological Laboratory; T. Celeste Napier, Ph.D., Professor in the Departments of Pharmacology and Psychiatry at Rush University Medical Center, and is the Director for the Center for Compulsive Behavior and Addiction at Rush University.

The current Ebola outbreak has claimed thousands of lives and has been declared a “Public Health Emergency of International Concern” by the World Health Organization. The alarming rate of new infections in Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone, and the spread of cases beyond West Africa to the US and Europe, continues to challenge the international community’s existing strategies for controlling the infectious disease. Continue reading “Ebola: Anatomy of a Global Outbreak”

The safety of the food supply has emerged as an important and complex global public health, social, and political issue. Although accurate statistics on the scope of foodborne illness are lacking, the most recent estimates published by the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) indicate that as many as 48 million cases, 128,000 hospitalizations, and 3,000 deaths are caused by foodborne illness each year in the U.S.

Watch a screening of the film “A Beautiful Mind” starring Russell Crowe and join University of Chicago experts in a discussion of the impact of John F. Nash Jr.’s work as well as the challenges he faced. Nash was the recipient of the 1994 Nobel Prize in Economics for his landmark work on the mathematics of game theory.