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