Consequences of Disease (Jean Ristaino)
Channel: Wolfpack Solutions
Date: 2023-03-10

In many contexts and times, diseases have reshaped life, whether it be human life, animal life or plant life. Jean Ristaino, Ph.D., a leading expert known as the “Sherlock of Spuds” discusses the pathogen that caused the Irish Potato Famine. Ristaino shares her own experience with plant pathology, her global travels to track outbreaks and her efforts to understand the history of the potato famine and why it is relevant to controlling emerging pathogens of all kinds today.

Ristaino’s lab works on emerging plant diseases that threaten global food security to understand the factors that contribute to disease emergence including the epidemiology and population genetics of Phytophthora infestans, which caused the Irish Potato Famine in the 1840s and is a reemerging threat to global food security. Ristaino serves as the director of the “Emerging Plant Disease and Global Food Security'' cluster at NC State, has served as a Jefferson Science Fellow for the U.S. Department of States Bureau for Food Security was a recent recipient of a Fulbright European Research Scholar Award to work with the University of Catania on late blight in Italy in 2018. In 2020, she was elected a Fellow of the American Phytopathological Society.

This video was originally produced for an audience of entering first-year and transfer students at NC State University as a part of an interdisciplinary experience. It is available for noncommercial reuse under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial 4.0 License, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/.