Sponsored by the Alumni Association of Princeton University 

Moderator:

Allison Carruth
Director, Program in Environmental Studies; Director, Blue Lab; Professor of American Studies and the High Meadows Environmental Institute

Panelists:     

John Seabrook ’81
Author; Staff Writer, New Yorker

Shaun Kennedy ’86
Director, The Food System Institute; and Associate Professor of Food Systems, University of Minnesota (retired) 

Abigail Neely ’01
Associate Professor of Geography and Associate Faculty in the Department of African and African American Studies and the Graduate Program in Ecology, Evolution, Environment and Society; School House Professor, Dartmouth College

Laura Kahn *01
Co-Founder, One Health Initiative

MODERATOR

Allison Carruth
Allison Carruth is a professor in the Effron Center for the Study of America and the High Meadows Environmental Institute. She directs the Program in Environmental Studies and leads Blue Lab, an environmental media and storytelling studio. From 2016 to 2020, she was the founding faculty director of UCLA’s Laboratory for Environmental Narrative Strategies (LENS). While leading LENS, she was an executive producer of a documentary series that produced films and web stories about L.A. environmental challenges. The series was developed in partnership with KCET/ PBS SoCal, the country’s largest public media outlet. Carruth is the author of three books: “Global Appetites: American Power and the Literature of Food” (Cambridge University Press, 2013); “Literature and Food Studies,” with Amy L. Tigner (Routledge, 2018); and “Novel Ecologies: Nature Remade and the Illusions of Tech” (University of Chicago Press, 2025).

PANELISTS

John Seabrook ’81
John Seabrook is a longtime staff writer at The New Yorker, where his writing on technology, music and culture has been widely anthologized. He is also the author of six books, including “Nobrow: The Culture of Marketing, The Marketing of Culture”; the best-selling “The Song Machine: Inside the Hit Factory”; and “The Spinach King: The Rise and Fall of an American Dynasty,” a family memoir about the Seabrooks of South Jersey and their pioneering role in frozen vegetables.

Shaun Kennedy ’86
Shaun Kennedy served as director of the National Center for Food Protection and Defense (NCFPD), a federally funded, multi-institution research center focused on protecting our food system from accidental and intentional failures. With programs from discovery science to real-time risk communication, NCFPD contributed significantly to advancing the resilience of our food systems. Kennedy’s research focuses on how the complex, adaptive systems that provide our food and agriculture products function, concentrating on failure modes and resiliency. This includes annually characterizing food system risk for federal agencies and exploring systems at the intersection of agriculture and the environment where infectious diseases can emerge. A strong advocate for science informing public policy, Kennedy designed and ran the first food system exercise for the Group of Eight, an intergovernmental political forum, to understand how communications and policy differences would unfold in an event. These efforts have changed how food system risk is managed globally.

Abigail Neely ’01
Abigail Neely has conducted ethnographic research in rural South Africa for 20 years, learning the world anew and offering insights into what it means to make meaningful lives in the face of devastating inequality. She has published several articles and a book, “Reimagining Social Medicine from the South,” and authored a second book (under review), “When Children Become Ancestors: Living and Dying in Post-Apartheid South Africa.” She also researches care labor and care ethics in order to think, live and create a different kind of university. At Dartmouth, she is the School House Professor, a former member of the Society of Fellows and an all-around rabble-rouser. Neely is also an American Association of Geographers Fellow. When not working, she likes to hike, ski, swim and paddleboard in New Hampshire’s mountains and lakes and is the mom of two boys and an overly enthusiastic golden retriever.

Laura Kahn *02
A physician, author and educator, Laura Kahn leads a pro bono team of interdisciplinary professionals at the One Health Initiative who promote the concept that human, animal, plant, environmental and ecosystem health are linked. Their 20-year advocacy effort has led to the endorsement and, in some cases, the adoption of One Health by organizations such as the World Health Organization, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, the American Medical Association, the American Veterinary Medical Association and the American Public Health Association. Kahn worked as a research scholar with the Program on Science and Global Security from 2002 to 2021 at Princeton’s School of Public and International Affairs. She has published three books, including “One Health and the Politics of Antimicrobial Resistance” (2016) and “One Health and the Politics of COVID-19,” (2024). Kahn’s many awards include the Presidential Award for Meritorious Service from the American Association of Public Health Physicians.