Gina Kolata Speaker Profile at The Lavin Agency

A senior writer at The New York Times, Gina Kolata writes accessibly about the sometimes confounding scientific and personal health issues of the day, while never compromising on breadth or depth of coverage. She has broken stories about avian flu, stem cell research, new treatments for cancer, advances in cloning, the latest in disease prevention, wait times in hospitals, the use of drugs in sports, and common household dangers. On more than one occasion, her writing has upended conventional wisdom.

Her critically acclaimed new book, Rethinking Thin, reveals that our society's obsession with losing weight is less about keeping trim and staying healthy than about money, power, politics, trends, and impossible ideals. Kolata takes us through a history of the place of diets in American society, explains the science of obesity and dieting, and offers a provocative critique of the powerful weight-loss industry. According to Publishers Weekly, the book "will change your thinking about weight, whether you struggle with it or not."

Kolata is the author of five previous books, including Ultimate Fitness: The Quest for Truth About Exercise and Health and the bestseller Flu: The Story of the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918 and the Search for the Virus That Caused It, which was recently re-released with a new epilogue on avian flu. A Pulitzer Prize finalist, Kolata was a speaker at the Program for Science and Humanities at Yale School of Medicine, and at the Wilson School at Princeton, where, as a visiting professor, she also taught a seminar on science writing. She has received many awards for her journalism, including the prestigious Susan G. Komen Foundation's media award for reporting on women's issues and breast cancer.

What does Gina Kolata talk about?

Rethinking Thin

In a starred review, Booklist called Kolata's Rethinking Thin "An unbiased look at society's war on fatness." In her eye-opening talks based on the book, Kolata, a charming and authoritative speaker, offers a lively and liberating challenge to the conventional wisdom about diets and weight loss, tackling many vital questions from an objective point of view: Why do people remain overweight when there is so much social pressure to be thin? Why does every diet reach a plateau where weight loss stalls? How important are genes in determining your weight, and how important are psychological factors, like stress? Is there such a thing as willpower when it comes to eating and body weight? Is hunger the same experience for everyone? What is the weight that is right for our bodies?

The 1918 Influenza Pandemic: Does It Hold Lessons for Today?

The 1918 influenza was a bird flu that caused the worst infectious disease epidemic ever, killing more people than any other disease of that duration in the history of the world. If a similar epidemic were to strike today, with the same death rate, it would kill more people in just a few months than die in a year from the major killers—heart disease, cancer, chronic pulmonary disease, stroke, and Alzheimer's—combined. The 1918 influenza killed mainly young adults, between the ages of 20 and 40. Gina Kolata asks: just how frightened should we be that another epidemic will come again? Are we prepared? And how can the media strike a balance between reporting the news and scaring everyone beyond reason?

Stem Cells: Hope or Hype?

The debate over stem cell research is one of the most important, and controversial, dialogues taking place in America today. Stemming from highly emotional arguments on both sides, this subject is in the headlines every day, and will, if anything, only become more complicated as both sides move forward with their positions. Gina Kolata takes us simultaneously deep into the debate, while also pulling out, to get an objective look, away from the charged commentators. How did we ever get to such a state? What is the truth about stem cells and what do scientists really think will come of research with them?

Reporting on Environmental Risks: Lessons Learned

Gina Kolata chooses stories in which environmental risks are not what they at first appear to be—and that's no coincidence. Of course chemicals and drugs and pollutants can be risky. Of course people have become sick or even died from exposure to toxins. But many of the exposures that have gotten the most attention have, on closer examination, turned out to be not quite what many people believe. When it comes to environmental hazards, deciding whether there is a risk and, if so, how much and what to do about it, is far from straightforward. It is not always easy to see why a frightening report of a health risk is wrong. In this presentation, Kolata takes us back over a career of covering environmental risks, and shares her many hard-earned insights.

On Being a Patient

Last year, The New York Times ran a high-profile series called "On Being a Patient." Kolata wrote in-depth about waiting in rooms—emergency rooms, examining rooms, and, of course, waiting rooms. She wrote about difficult doctors who leave you feeling dehumanized, and make you want to swear off the whole medical profession. In this presentation, Kolata recalls her search for three important things: real data on waiting times that would establish whether there was a problem and, if so, how big it was and where it was most manifest; methods to alleviate waiting times and reliable data on how effective they are; and credible stories from patients who have suffered from long waits. None were easy to find because it seemed that no one had pulled these data together before and people who had one part of the picture, like alleviating waits in hospitals, did not have other parts, like alleviating waits for medical records or waits in doctors' waiting rooms.

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