Tonight’s University Lecture: On the Front Lines against COVID in the Lab, Science Will Win

Joseph Mizgerd hasn’t lost anyone to COVID-19 personally, but that doesn’t mean the pandemic hasn’t affected him.

“I’ve had several deaths in the family that were not due to COVID, but they were still deaths that we would like to be getting together and having funerals for, and we haven’t done that,” he says. “We have not traveled to see each other, including parents and children and siblings, even through really horrible things like losses, and that’s been a profound and difficult change for us.”

Anyone questioning social distancing, masks, and other coronavirus precautions would do well to heed his example. Mizgerd, a School of Medicine professor of medicine, microbiology, and biochemistry, director of the University’s Pulmonary Center, and an investigator at the National Emerging Infectious Diseases Laboratories (NEIDL), has been on the front lines of the struggle to understand COVID-19 and the body’s response to it.

Mizgerd has been tapped to deliver the 2020 University Lecture, titled From Cough to COVID: How Respiratory Infections Produce Problems and Our Bodies Fight Back, today, Tuesday, November 17, at 5 pm via Zoom. The event is free and open to the public, but registration is required.

Established in 1950, the annual University Lecture highlights the outstanding and thought-provoking research of a BU faculty member to the BU community and the public.

“I don’t think anything has had as much intense interest from everybody on earth as COVID-19 has, and as somebody who’s been studying respiratory infections for a lot of years, I get a lot of questions directed to me,” he says.