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Science journalist Sonia Shah and documentary filmmaker Carl Gierstorfer are among Pulitzer Center grantees who bring light to the history and future of emerging diseases. The two visit Campus Consortium partner Westchester Community College on Thursday, February 25, 2016, speaking to students in journalism and democracy courses as well as a video production class.
Shah released her latest book, Pandemic: Tracking Contagions, From Cholera to Ebola and Beyond, in February 2016. Pandemic, her fourth book and the second one about deadly diseases, looks at the widely held belief by epidemiologists that we will have a pandemic within the next two generations, and explores which of the infectious diseases that we already know about are most likely to resurface and cause this pandemic.
She is well-known for reporting about diseases such as cholera and malaria: Her 2013 TEDGlobal talk received over 1 million views, and her book, The Fever received praise from the The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Time and others. Her Pulitzer Center-supported project, "Mapping Cholera," considers past, present and future of one of the world's most deadly infectious diseases.
Gierstorfer is a German documentary filmmaker with a background in biology. As a videographer he has reported from all corners of this world.
His most recent Pulitzer Center-supported documentary We Want You to Live: Liberia’s Fight Against Ebola (co-produced by SWR/ARTE, Al Jazeera, Sales: PBS International) reveals one community's fight for survival against Ebola through the eyes of Liberians battling to bring the outbreak to an end. The film follows four characters over the course of five months in their struggles against the disease. We Want You to Live comes on the heels of Gierstorfer's 2014 film, The Bloody Truth, a detective-like medical documentary following researchers in their efforts to determine the origins of HIV.