MIT World Speakers

John M. Barry

John M. Barry is a prize-winning and New York Times best-selling author whose books have won more than twenty awards. In 2005 the National Academy of Sciences named The Great Influenza, a study of the 1918 pandemic, the year’s outstanding book on science or medicine, and the Center for Biodefense and Emerging Pathogens gave Barry its 2005 “September Eleventh Award.” Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America, won the 1998 Francis Parkman Prize of the Society of American Historians for the year’s best book of American history.

Barry serves on advisory boards at MIT’s Center for Engineering Systems Fundamentals, the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, and on a federal government Infectious Disease Board of Experts. He has advised federal, state, and World Health Organization officials on influenza, crisis management, and risk communication.

He has been keynote speaker at a White House Conference on the Mississippi Delta and he has lectured at the National War College, Harvard Business School, and in many similar venues. He is also co-originator of Riversphere, a $100 million center being developed by Tulane University which will be the first facility in the world dedicated to comprehensive river research.