Mari Webel is an Associate Professor in the Department of History, specializing in modern Africa and the history of health. She received her Ph.D in 2012 from Columbia University, followed by a postdoctoral fellowship in global health and African Studies at Emory University. Webel joined the Pitt faculty in 2014. Her book The Politics of Disease Control: Sleeping Sickness in Eastern Africa, 1890-1920, will be released this month in the New African Histories series of Ohio University Press. The Politics of Disease Control is a history of African politics and colonial public health, focusing on sleeping sickness at Lake Victoria and Lake Tanganyika. Her current project, The Neglected Tropical Diseases in Global Health’s History and Present examines the emergence of the “NTDs” as an operative and imaginative category in public health since the 1970s. She was awarded the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation’s New Directions Fellowship in 2019 to pursue training in epidemiology and parasitology for her ongoing work on the history of the NTDs.