The pandemic of 2020-21 (and 2022) came as no surprise to Wake Forest Biology Teaching Professor Pat Lord (Ph.D. 1986). She has been teaching about pandemics years before the Covid-19 outbreak. Pat Lord’s career has revolved around the teaching and research of virology– her work showed that a pandemic was in our past, present, and future.
She has taught classes that were prescient of the health and economic impact of pandemics on society for the students of Wake Forest.
In fall 2018 and fall 2019, she taught a first-year seminar, “Outbreak: Coming Soon to a Neighborhood Near You,” about the cultural, biological, economic and societal factors that contribute to the spread of a pandemic other than just the virus itself. Both years, her students designed on-campus exhibits about infectious diseases to tie into an exhibit at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History on the 100th anniversary of the 1918 flu pandemic. In an ironic twist, the exhibit designed by the students in 2019 was forced to close in early 2020 because of COVID-19.
— Kerry King, Wake Forest Magazine, February 2022
Kerry King from Wake Forest Magazine profiles the career teaching of Dr. Pat Lord in the piece entitled “Amid Pandemics” in the February issue.
Click here to read more https://magazine.wfu.edu/2022/02/05/amid-pandemics/