As you’ve noticed, this is the second opportunity we’ve had for an expert (following David Wallace Wells earlier this week) to visit with us on campus. This is because we recently joined UH to help co-sponsor the Better Tomorrow Speaker Series in efforts to encourage new thinking, shift paradigms and ignite new possibilities and action around critical issues in our state and beyond. Each speaker has a public event, most often hosted at the UH-Mānoa campus, and with our sponsorship, we are able to bring these brilliant thinkers and doers to our campus to speak directly with our kumu and students. Please keep your eyes peeled for future opportunities. Coming up next around Feb 20 will be Columbia Law Professor and net neutrality writer Tim Wu. Here’s more info about the Better Tomorrow Speaker Series.

Lita served as the Director of the Human Microbiome Project, a $200m project aimed at better understanding how microbiomes- bacterial species including viruses and fungi- live in people and what part they plan in human biology beyond agents of infectious diseases. Check out her 2019 article “Priorities for the next 10 years of human microbiome research” for background about the project and its research.