Special Episode: Jeff Shaman

This is a bonus episode, thrown together quickly, as the coronavirus pandemic is evolving at such a rapid pace that predicting what it will look like in the weeks ahead is incredibly difficult. The guest is Jeff Shaman, one of the world's experts in modeling the spread of infectious diseases. He is a professor in the Department of Environmental Health Sciences at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health, but these days he is spending his time less on his research than on communicating with public officials and sharing his expertise with the White House and the CDC. Despite his overfull schedule, he took the time to do this interview (in fact, two of them), and we are deeply grateful for this. While Jeff's work focuses now on epidemiology, his academic background is in climate science, so he fits right in the profile of this podcast. The conversation opens with Jeff's biography (including the story of how he almost became an opera singer) and then moves on to his seminal work on the flu (Jeff found out why the flu peaks in winter and largely subsides in summer). The discussion about the current coronavirus outbreak starts about 55 minutes in. The two interviews with Jeff Shaman were recorded on March 18 and March 24, 2020. Image credit: AP Photo/Mary Altaffer Jeff's website with information on his research, papers, biography etc. Johns Hopkins coronavirus resource center  Updates on the coronavirus/COVID-19 situation by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

Om Podcasten

Deep Convection is a podcast featuring real conversations between climate scientists (or sometimes those working in areas adjacent to climate science). The goal is to capture what it is like to work in our field at this moment in history. We talk about our lives, how we came to do what we do, what the work means to us, and how that is changing, or isn’t – and sometimes about science. Our top priority is to capture good conversations, but if some learning happens that’s fine too.