Panic in the Streets
Before the film, microbiologist Silvia Caballero will discuss antibiotic drug resistance, and new approaches that are being developed to control bacterial infections.
In Elia Kazan's suspenseful melodrama, a bullet-ridden corpse turns up in the water off the New Orleans docks. To the police, he’s a John Doe... until a public health doctor (Richard Widmark) discovers he carries a virulent strain of bubonic plague. Hundreds of officers are mobilized to track down the killers and all who had contact with the dead man in a desperate race against the clock before the highly contagious disease spreads far beyond the port area and puts the entire country in peril.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Silvia Caballero is a Senior Staff Scientist at Vedanta Biosciences working on developing a new class of therapeutics to combat the growing threat of antibiotic resistance. She leads the Multidrug Resistance program at Vedanta and is spearheading Vedanta’s efforts to develop bacterial consortia designed to fight off superbugs as a strategy to prevent infection. She earned her BA in Biological Sciences from Hunter College of the City University of New York and received her PhD from Weill Cornell University where she investigated the role of the intestinal bacterial flora in preventing colonization by multidrug-resistant organisms (MDROs). Her work led to the identification of bacterial species responsible for eliminating vancomycin-resistant Enterococcus, one of the top five MDROs in hospitals worldwide, from the gastrointestinal tract. Silvia has received fellowships from the Gates Foundation and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. She was the recipient of the Innovator of the Year award in 2019 and 2018 by MIT’s Technology Review Under 35 Global and Latin America editions and was recently named to Time 100 Next List for innovative leaders.
