• Presented by the Bloomberg School of Public Health and Hopkins at Home •
• Featuring Raj Panjabi, BSPH '06 (MPH), Dean Sarah Szanton, and Lisa Cooper •

When crisis strikes — a diagnosis, a natural disaster, a sudden upheaval at work or at home — our instinct is to pull inward. But as Hopkins alumnus Dr. Raj Panjabi argues in his new book, Safer: A Playbook—Turning Fear into Action and Crisis into Community, isolation is the wrong instinct. Connection is the real protection.

Dr. Panjabi has spent his career on the front lines of crisis: fleeing civil war in Liberia as a child, building community health systems as founding CEO of Last Mile Health, and steering the nation's pandemic response as White House Senior Director for Global Health Security. In Safer, he distills that experience into a practical roadmap — eight "plays" for navigating fear, cutting through misinformation, and rebuilding trust in divided times.

Joining Dr. Panjabi for this conversation are two Johns Hopkins leaders whose own work embodies the book's central idea — that community, not isolation, is what keeps us safe. Sarah Szanton, Dean of the Johns Hopkins School of Nursing, is the architect of CAPABLE, a program that has helped thousands of older adults age safely in their own communities rather than in isolation. Lisa Cooper, the James F. Fries Professor of Medicine and a Bloomberg Distinguished Professor across Hopkins' Schools of Medicine, Nursing, and Public Health, has spent her career studying how trust between patients, physicians, and communities determines who stays healthy — and who doesn't.

Together, our speakers explore what it really takes to turn fear into action and crisis into community, both in our health systems and in our daily lives.