Join us in the Day Hall Tuesday, Oct. 12 for this Alston Lecture. Cassandra Quave, PhD, is the herbarium curator and an associate professor of dermatology and human health at Emory University. She is also the co-founder and CEO/CSO of PhytoTEK LLC, a drug-discovery company dedicated to developing solutions from botanicals for the treatment of recalcitrant antibiotic-resistant infections. She is the co-creator and host of the podcast Foodie Pharmacology. A leader in the field of medical botany, she has authored more than 100 scientific publications and has been featured in the New York Times Magazine and BBC Focus, as well as on PBS, NPR, and the National Geographic Channel. The Plant Hunter is Dr. Quave’s first book; a book-signing will follow the lecture.

About the Lecture: Plants are the basis for an array of medicines we all now take for granted, and they may provide the solution needed in the fight against the greatest medical challenge of this century: the rise of the post-antibiotic era. No one understands this better than Dr. Cassandra Quave, whose groundbreaking research as a medical ethnobotanist—someone who identifies and studies plants to treat threatening illnesses—is helping to provide clues for the next generation of advanced medicines. Her quest is personal as well as scientific: as a person born with multiple congenital defects of her skeletal system who nearly lost her life at the age of three due to a staph infection, she has an intimate knowledge of the strengths and failing of modern medicine. Dr. Quave weaves together science, botany, and memoir to recount her own journey, which has taken her from the flooded forests of the remote Amazon to isolated mountaintops in Albania in search of natural compounds, long known to traditional healers that could help save us all from this looming crisis.

The Philip and Elkin Alston Lecture Series is made possible by the generous support of the Charles Loridans Foundation.