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MacArthur Fellows Nabarun Dasgupta and Gregg Gonsalves on their life-saving work.

In recent years, the opioid epidemic and dangers of fentanyl have dominated headlines, resulting in a greater understanding of those who use drugs. Join us for a conversation with two leading voices in the field of epidemiology, Nabarun Dasgupta and Gregg Gonsalves, on their shared experiences in understanding and preventing harms from drug use. Dasgupta and Gonsalves discuss their domestic and international careers in public health, the current overdose epidemic, and delivering care in the midst of the continuing “war on drugs.” Drawing on their experiences working directly with impacted communities, they consider how our current systems fail people who use drugs — and how we can reimagine them to prioritize the people at the center of the drug epidemic.

Dr. Nabarun Dasgupta is a street drug scientist at the University of North Carolina whose passion is telling true stories about health with numbers. Since 2002, he has done pioneering work in overdose prevention and addiction treatment.

Dr. Gregg Gonsalves is an expert in policy modeling on infectious disease and substance use, as well as the intersection of public policy and health equity. For more than 30 years, he has worked on HIV/AIDS and other global health issues.

Nabarun Dasgupta, PhD, MPH, is a street drug scientist at the University of North Carolina, whose passion is telling true stories about health with numbers. At the UNC Opioid Data Lab his team has analyzed over 20,000 street drug samples donated via front line public health organizations, health departments, clinics. He pairs the resulting nuanced understanding of the illicit drug supply with large database analytics on overdose deaths to make sense of shifting drug use patterns. From molecules to populations, his work is deeply rooted in community engagement and amplifying lived experience voices. Since 2002 he has done pioneering work in overdose prevention and addiction treatment. He is a recipient of the 2025 MacArthur Fellowship. In 2023 he was placed on the TIME100 Next list of rising global leaders. Sign up for his newsletter (opioiddata.org) to stay on top of the latest drug trends.

Gregg Gonsalves is an expert in policy modeling on infectious disease and substance use, as well as the intersection of public policy and health equity. His research focuses on the use of quantitative models for improving the response to epidemic diseases. For more than 30 years, he worked on HIV/AIDS and other global health issues with several organizations, including the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, the Treatment Action Group, Gay Men’s Health Crisis, and the AIDS and Rights Alliance for Southern Africa. He is a 2011 graduate of Yale College and received his PhD from Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences/School of Public Health in 2017. He is currently the public health correspondent for The Nation. He is a 2018 MacArthur Fellow.

Mary Pounder is the Executive Director at the Comer Family Foundation, which seeds innovative ideas in education, environment, healthcare, and the arts nationwide. She has a passion for advancing equitable health care through harm reduction to prevent overdose and the transmission of HIV and HCV through drug use. As the longest private funder of U.S. harm reduction, the foundation works closely with low barrier rural and urban syringe access programs and serves as a resource for best practices, including advising SAMHSA on its national harm reduction framework published in 2024.

Mary serves on the boards of AIDS Foundation of Chicago as Policy and Advocacy Chair, Teens Take on Climate, Global Climate Change Foundation and Comer Family Foundation. In 2020 she co-created the Chicago Racial Justice Pooled Fund which has invested $10 million dollars to Chicago community organizers building and sustaining movements for justice that center Black lives and address anti-Blackness. This commitment continues, with another $15M promised by 2031.

Previously, she led UnitedHealthcare’s Central Region Corporate Social Responsibility, National Medicaid implementation & remediation, and mergers/acquisitions in five states. Mary received her master’s in public health at Northern Illinois University. Mary enjoys her downtime by playing folk music and admiring sunrises on Chicago’s lakefront.

Get tickets here: https://mycart.chicagohumanities.org/1578/1657