B Movies and Bad History: Outbreaks

Dr. Diana Cervantes is Assistant Professor and Director of the MPH Epidemiology Program at the University of North Texas Health Science Center at Fort Worth. She has worked as a bioterrorism response microbiologist and epidemiologist at Tarrant County Public Health, where she spent years conducting numerous infectious disease investigations, and outbreak response and control activities in both community and healthcare settings.

Dr. Cervantes then served as Chief Epidemiologist for the Texas Department of State Health Services, Health Service Region 2/3, which provides services to 49 counties in North Texas. In that position, she was charged with leading a team of seven epidemiologists to implement infectious disease surveillance and prevention and control activities responding to major public health issues, including Ebola response in Dallas and one of the largest mumps outbreaks in the United States.

Dr. Tom Schatz is the Mary Gibbs Jones Centennial Chair (and interim chairman) of the Department of Radio-Television-Film at The University of Texas at Austin, where he has been on the faculty since 1976, and is the Executive Director of the University of Texas Film Institute. He has written four books about Hollywood films and filmmaking, including Hollywood Genres: Formulas, Filmmaking, and the Studio System; The Genius of the System: Hollywood Filmmaking in the Studio Era; and Boom and Bust: American Cinema in the 1940s. Schatz edited the four-volume collection, Hollywood: Critical Concepts, and he also serves as series editor of the Film and Media Studies Series for the University of Texas Press. Schatz's writing on film has appeared in numerous magazines, newspapers, and academic journals, including The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Premiere, The Nation, Film Comment, Film Quarterly, and Cineaste.

Schatz lectures widely on American film and television in the U.S. and abroad, and he has delivered talks and conducted seminars for the Motion Picture Academy, the Directors Guild of America, the American Film Institute and the Los Angeles Film School.