John M. Barry is an award-winning author and historian. His #1 New York Times bestseller, The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History, landed him as a guest on numerous news shows in the past year, such as “Meet the Press” and “All Things Considered.” He has written for scientific journals as well as for news outlets such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, Time, and Esquire. As an advisor to the Bush and Obama administrations on pandemic preparedness and response, he served on the original team that recommended public health measures to mitigate a pandemic before a vaccine becomes available.

After Hurricane Katrina, Barry’s earlier book, Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America, placed him in a policy role in his home state of Louisiana, where the state’s Congressional delegation asked him to chair a bipartisan working group on flood protection. He served on both the Louisiana Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority and the levee board protecting metropolitan New Orleans. In that latter role, he was the architect of a 2013 lawsuit against Exxon and nearly 100 other companies for the coastal land loss they caused.

Barry has worked with the private sector and with state, federal, United Nations, and World Health Organization officials on pandemics, water-related disasters, and risk communication. He serves on numerous advisory boards and is a professor at the Tulane University School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine. He is the only non-scientist ever to give the National Academies of Sciences Abel Wolman Distinguished Lecture, and he was the only non-scientist on a federal government Infectious Disease Board of Experts.