Award-winning author and Cornell professor Drew Harvell will talk about her recent books and tell how she and her team have worked to sustain ocean biodiversity in the world’s oceans. She’ll tell of SCUBA expeditions to confront the rising tide of ocean outbreaks such as the Sea Star Epidemic and global coral reef health as detailed in her new book, OCEAN OUTBREAK.
The book explores the impact from a perfect storm of outbreak conditions caused by human activity, as infections cause massive die-offs in the ocean with sweeping ecological impacts, including loss of food harvest and impacts to our own health as a warming ocean provides an incubator for pathogens. Ocean Outbreak has received strong praise from Nature, Forbes, Smithsonian Magazine and The Atlantic.

Harvell is Curator of the Blaschka Marine Invertebrates Collection at Cornell, and her earlier book, A Sea of Glass: Searching for the Blaschka’s Fragile Legacy in an Ocean at Risk, celebrate the biodiversity still in our oceans. A Sea of Glass was picked as one of the best eight “Art Meets Science” books of 2016 by the Smithsonian and winner of the National Outdoor Book Award.