Annual Shine Lecture: Sheri Fink

Sheri Fink is the author of the New York Times bestselling book Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital about choices made in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. She is a co-creator and an executive producer of the Emmy-nominated Netflix documentary television series Pandemic: How to Prevent an Outbreak (2020), filmed the year prior to the Covid-19 pandemic. Fink contributed to the New York Times’ Pulitzer Prize-winning coverage of the pandemic. Her and her colleagues’ stories on Ebola in West Africa were recognized with the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for international reporting, the George Polk Award for health reporting, and the Overseas Press Club Hal Boyle Award. Her story “The Deadly Choices at Memorial,” co-published by ProPublica and the New York Times Magazine, received a 2010 Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting and a National Magazine Award for reporting. Fink is an adjunct associate professor at the Tulane School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine. A former relief worker in disaster and conflict zones, she received her M.D. and Ph.D. from Stanford University. Her first book, War Hospital: A True Story of Surgery and Survival (PublicAffairs), is about medical professionals under siege during the genocide in Srebrenica, Bosnia-Herzegovina. Five Days at Memorial was the winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for nonfiction, the PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for nonfiction, the Ridenhour Book Prize, the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance Book Award, the American Medical Writers Association Medical Book Award, and the NASW Science in Society Journalism Book Award.

George J. Annas is William Fairfield Warren Distinguished Professor at Boston University and Director of the Center for Health Law, Ethics & Human Rights at Boston University School of Public Health, and a member of the Department of Health Law, Policy and Management at the School of Public Health. He is also a Professor at the School of Law and School of Medicine. He is author or editor of 20 books on health law and bioethics, including The Rights of Patients (3d ed 2004), Public Health Law (2d ed 2014), American Bioethics (2005), Worst Case Bioethics (2010), and Genomic Messages (2015). He is a member of the National Academy of Medicine and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He is the co-founder of Global Lawyers & Physicians, a NGO dedicated to promoting health and human rights.