The Extra Extra Life Conversations, Part Three

An in-depth exploration of the themes of each PBS episode, featuring leading experts from the world of public health and medicine.

We hope you’ve had a chance to enjoy episode three of the PBS series, Extra Life, on the past, present and future of using data to fight disease and improve health outcomes. A topic as complex and timely as this one inevitably warrants further conversation. And so we’re happy to present the third in a series of four video conversations — each building off a specific episode of Extra Life — produced in collaboration with the CDC Foundation.

To explore these themes, we have two fantastic guests joining us.

Dr Lauren Smith is the chief health equity and strategy officer for the CDC Foundation. Dr. Smith partners with the CDC Foundation’s other senior leaders to develop and drive strategic efforts to embed health equity across the Foundation’s COVID-19 response activities with an explicit focus on addressing systemic racism and its impact on vulnerable populations’ resiliency amidst the pandemic. She was previously medical director at the Massachusetts Department of Public Health,

Dr. Caitlin Rivers is a Senior Scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security and an Assistant Professor in the Department of Environmental Health and Engineering at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Her research focuses on improving public health preparedness and response, particularly by improving capabilities for “outbreak science” and infectious disease modeling to support public health decision making.

We’ll be back with a new conversation following the fourth and final episode, on the role of behavior change in improve our health and fighting disease outbreaks, which airs at 8PM on PBS on Tuesday, June 1. In the meantime, you can purchase a copy of the book version of Extra Life from any of the booksellers here. Educators who are interested in integrating the Extra Life story into their classrooms can explore the extensive curriculum materials developed by the Pulitzer Center.

Thanks to the CDC Foundation, a nonprofit focused on saving and improving lives by strengthening public health protection through partnerships across the globe. Together our impact is greater.