PITTSBURGH, April 28 – John M. Barry, award-winning author of the best-seller “The Great Influenza: The Epic Story on the Greatest Plague in History” will deliver this year’s convocation address to the 2010
University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health graduating class. His talk, “Unnatural Disasters: Pandemics, Hurricanes, Politics and the Individual,” will conclude the school’s 60th annual convocation to be held at 6 p.m., Sunday, May 2, at the Carnegie Music Hall in Oakland.
In 2005, The National Academies of Science named “The Great Influenza,” a study of the 1918 pandemic, the year’s outstanding book on science or medicine. His previous book “Rising Ride: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How it Changed America” won the Francis Parkman Prize from the Society of American Historians in 1998.
Barry has been invited by both the Bush and Obama administrations to counsel the federal government on pandemic preparedness and response. He also has advised other federal, state, United Nations and World Health Organization officials on influenza, water-related disasters, crisis management and risk communication. He is a frequent guest on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” ABC’s “World News” and NPR’s “All Things Considered.”
A resident of New Orleans, Barry serves on the advisory boards for the Center for Engineering Systems Fundamentals at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, the Society of American Historians, and American Heritage Rivers.
4/28/2010