UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Nita Bharti, Penn State assistant professor of biology, will deliver a virtual lecture titled “Adaptation for Survival: Humans and Their Pathogens” at 4 p.m. on Thursday, Feb. 10, as part of Penn State’s 2022 Darwin Day celebration. Advance registration is required for the event, which is open to the public.

Bharti has been part of the Penn State faculty and a member of Penn State’s Center for Infectious Disease Dynamics since 2016. Her research focuses on how the interactions between humans and their environment affect the spread of infectious diseases. In addition to combining modern remote sensing and conventional field epidemiology to quantify how human movement influences infection risk and the impact of interventions, Bharti also develops methods to overcome biases in the detectability of disease in underserved populations to decrease health inequities.

Bharti’s Darwin Day lecture will examine how understanding human-pathogen interactions in the environmental and cultural contexts in which they occur is a global health priority. She will discuss how local context can help identify and integrate unconventional types of data on humans, pathogens and environments to help prevent diseases that threaten humans (like measles and Hendra virus) in the populations where they most urgently need to be addressed.

Darwin Day is an international celebration held each year around Charles Darwin’s birthday (Feb. 12, 1809) to recognize his contributions to science and to promote science in general. This year’s Penn State celebration is co-sponsored by the Huck Institutes of the Life Sciences and the Center for Human Evolution and Diversity in the College of the Liberal Arts; to learn more, contact Tess Wilson at tmw119@psu.edu.