Sabrina Sholts, PhD

Sabrina Sholts is a Curator of Biological Anthropology at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, where her research uses museum collections to explore intersections of human, animal, and environmental health in the past. She has published widely in academic journals such as JAMA, PNAS, and Trends in Ecology & Evolution, and written popular articles for Scientific American and Smithsonian Magazine. She received her PhD in Anthropology at UC Santa Barbara and was a postdoctoral researcher at UC Berkeley (Integrative Biology) and Stockholm University (Biophysics and Biochemistry). She was named a World Economic Forum Young Scientist in 2019.

As the Lead Curator of the Outbreak: Epidemics in a Connected World exhibition at the Smithsonian, she has been educating the public about the history, zoonotic origins, and increasing risks of pandemics for nearly a decade. Her first book on human factors of pandemics will be published by MIT Press in 2024.