Emerging diseases, medical advancements, and their impact on society will be analyzed at the Science Forum this week.
Caroline Graber, research nurse at Vanderbilt University and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, will cover Ebola, recently discovered hospital-acquired infections, resistant bacteria, and the recent flu epidemic during her talk. Her lecture, titled “Emerging Infections—Old Germs, New Problems,” begins at noon on Friday, October 3, in Room C-D of Thompson-Boling Arena.
The Science Forum is a weekly lunchtime series that allows professors and area scientists to discuss their research with the general public in a conversational presentation.
Free and open to the public, each Science Forum consists of a forty-minute presentation followed by a question-and-answer session. Attendees are encouraged to bring their own lunch or purchase it at the café in Thompson-Boling Arena. The Science Forum is sponsored by the UT Office of Research and Quest, an initiative to raise awareness of the research, scholarship, and creative activity happening on campus.
Graber will discuss new medical topics concerning resistant organisms, vaccination practices, and diseases like Ebola. She will specifically address the Chikungunya virus and the Middle Eastern respiratory virus, two infectious diseases emerging in the Western Hemisphere.
Graber earned her bachelor’s degree in nursing from UT and her master’s degree in microbiology from the University of Michigan Medical School. She worked as director of infection control and the institutional review board at East Tennessee Children’s Hospital before moving to Vanderbilt’s School of Medicine.
The weekly Science Forum continues throughout the semester:
October 10—Joan Rentsch, UT professor of communication studies, will talk about “Communicating to Build Knowledge in Decision-Making Teams.”
October 24—Philip Enquist, UT-ORNL Chair for High Performance Energy Practices in Urban Environments, will speak on “Higher Density Living with Higher Quality of Life.”
October 31—Stefan Spanier, professor of physics, will talk on “Searching for New Forces with the Large Hadron Collider.”
November 7—Omer Onar, Alvin M. Weinberg Fellow at ORNL, will discuss “Electric Vehicles without Plugging In.”
November 14—Tim Isbel, Anderson County Commissioner, will speak on “A Vision for Rocky Top’s Coal Creek Miners Museum.”
November 21—Steven Ripp, research associate professor at the Center for Environmental Biotechnology, will talk about “Catch of the Day: Tiny Zebrafish in the Big Pharmaceutical Pond.”
For more about the UT Science Forum, visit the website.
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C O N T A C T :
Amy Blakely (865-974-5034, ablakely@utk.edu)