On April 12, Professor Bourouiba spoke at MIT’s forward-looking symposium, Frontiers of the Future. She told the audience that among the problems the world faces is the emergence — and sometimes the re-emergence — of deadly infectious diseases, which were thought to be history by now. Understanding and controlling or mitigating these disease trends require bridging a divide of disciplines, she said, between the microbiology-level study of the disease agents themselves, and the ecology or population-level epidemiology dynamics of spread. At this intermediate scale, physical processes are ubiquitous and can open the way in rooting epidemiology in physical sciences and microbiology to improve infectious disease control and mitigation. Read the MIT News story.