Show Notes
A powerful blend of deeply human stories and rigorous research, The Collective Cure: Upstream Solutions for Better Public Health (Beacon Press, 2026) reveals how social and structural factors like income, occupation, race and ethnicity, neighborhood conditions, and social connections, profoundly shape our well-being. Dr. Monica Wang, an award-winning public health researcher, educator, and working mother who came of age as an Asian American bussing student, brings a personal lens to these complex issues and shares a hopeful, action-oriented vision for building healthier communities from the ground up.Through her own personal and professional journey and the lives of 3 extraordinary women across the US, readers are invited to see how health is shaped in everyday spaces: Marielis, a first-generation Latina student navigating financial insecurity in the Bronx; Dorothy, a semi-retired Black community organizer in rural Alabama; and Rosa, an Indigenous clinical social worker preserving ancestral traditions in Texas.
With clarity, urgency, and optimism, The Collective Cure bridges powerful storytelling with evidence-based solutions. More than a diagnosis, this book is a call to reimagine what’s possible when we invest in people and places.
Our guest is: Dr. Monica L. Wang, who is an award-winning public health researcher and educator. She is an associate professor at the Boston University School of Public Health, an adjunct associate professor at the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health, and executive editor at Public Health Post.
Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who is an academic writing coach and developmental editor. She produces and hosts the Academic Life podcast.
Playlist for listeners:
Womanist Bioethics
The Well-Gardened Mind
Community-Building
Breaking free from overworking and underliving
The Burnout Workbook
Reproductive Justice
A Meaningful Life
Being Well in Academia
The Good- Enough Life
Gender Bias in the E.R.
Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! Please join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 300+ Academic Life episodes? Find them here. And thank you for listening! Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science
More from New Books in Science
In this special installment of the University of Notre Dame Press's Books for Better Understanding, Paul Scherz, the Our Lady of Guadalupe Professor of Theology with the University of Notre Dame, and Travis Pickell, Assistant Professor at George Fox University, get together to discuss their books, The Ethics of Precision Medicine: The Problems of Prevention in Healthcare, and Burdened Agency: Christian Theology and End-of-Life Ethics, both available from the University of Notre Dame Press.
How the ground-breaking discovery of a new material form in chemistry—matter in a dynamic kinetic state—is helping to explain life’s unique characteristics. The materialist view of nature has guided scientific thinking since Galileo—reality can be measured, modeled, and explained. Nature is objective. But our everyday life experiences just don’t seem to fit in with that view. Purpose, desire, and consciousness are real, but not objective. How could natural processes have led to such unnatural consequences? The physical nature of living matter, a material form that has totally overwhelmed our planet, remains inexplicably unresolved. Biology, never mind psychology, simply does not make basic physical sense. Until now. In Life’s Chemical Secret: The Origin of Purpose and Mind (MIT Press, 2026), Addy Pross offers at last a scientific explanation for life’s greatest puzzle. Through the discovery of a new dimension in chemical possibility, Pross and his collaborators have opened a new door to understanding life’s fundamental nature. The emergence of cognition, mind, and purpose is now comprehensible through the existence of dynamic kinetic states of matter. Some four billion years after life on earth first appeared, living forms can now understand how the universe was able to discover itself.
Miracle Road demonstrates how the story of Research Triangle Park is a fascinating and important case study of urban development in the twenty-first century.
This inaugural podcast for the Voices of Discovery podcast from the University of Houston Clear Lake features a discussion of Team MAPPS, a federally-funded program that is available online to help people increase collaboration within teams.
In the early nineteenth century, the French naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck proposed the first evolutionary theory of life and, with it, a new science: biology. Yet for centuries, evolutionary theorists have endeavored to discredit Lamarck and his theory of self-transforming organisms, rejecting the idea that animals play an active role in shaping their own evolution. In his lifetime, he was mocked by his adversaries and personally insulted by Napoleon. In this virtuosic melding of biography, history, politics, and science, Jessica Riskin sets out to correct the record. Riskin tells the story of Lamarck’s life and work as an intense struggle between rival forces to answer questions that remain foundational to our modern worldview: What is a living being, and what is science?