dan werb
The Short Version
Dan Werb, PhD, is an award-winning writer and epidemiologist whose work has appeared in The New York Times, Salon, and elsewhere. He holds faculty appointments at the University of California San Diego and the University of Toronto.
The Longer Story
Dan Werb, PhD, is an award-winning science writer and social epidemiologist. His work has appeared in the New York Times, TIME, The Daily Beast, Salon, The Believer, Literary Hub, The Walrus, Buzzfeed, and many others. Dan’s most recent book is The Invisible Siege: The Rise of Coronaviruses and the Search for a Cure (Crown, 2022), a narrative non-fiction journey chronicling the decades-long efforts to develop the scientific response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Nature, the world’s foremost science journal, described it as “a powerfully written study of the pandemic.” It was also selected by Publishers Weekly’s as one of the top ten science books of Spring 2022, and an accompanying starred review described it as “[a] page-turning and unsettling look at the history of coronaviruses”. The book won the 2022 Hilary Weston Writer’s Trust Prize in Nonfiction, Canada’s highest non-fiction literary honor. Dan’s first non-fiction book, City of Omens: A Search for the Missing Women of the Borderlands (Bloomsbury, 2019), an account of a femicide epidemic in the border city of Tijuana, Mexico, was selected by The New York Times Book Review as part of its 2019 Summer Reading Series. He has also won top awards from the U.S. National Institutes of Health, including a 2015 Avenir Award, awarded for scientists generating high risk and high reward ideas to prevent the spread of epidemics. Dan is also a musician, having toured professionally around the world with multiple bands.