Dan Werb
Dan Werb is an award-winning writer and social epidemiologist whose work has appeared in The New York Times, Time, Salon, and other outlets. He holds faculty appointments at UC-San Diego and the University of Toronto. His latest book, "Our Wild Familars," was publilshed in July 2026. Dan's previous book, "The Invisible Siege," was selected by Publisher's Weekly as a Top 10 science book in Spring 2022.
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Awards: Writers' Trust Prize for Nonfiction (Canada)
Books:
Our Wild Familiars
How Animals Are Adapting to Cities and Reshaping the Natural World
Science / Medicine / Technology
Random House
July 2026
ISBN 9780593799635
hardcover, 337 pages
A dazzling journey into the hidden lives of synanthropes, the wild animals who've found ingenious ways to survive and thrive in human communities—from award-winning writer and epidemiologist Dan WerbSynanthropes have always been an immutable part of the tapestry of our lives.
They are the reason we hear birdsong in the morning and skittering throughout the day, and why we take such pains to fix lids to our garbage cans. But they are so much more than that, too: epidemic vectors, churners of soil, ecosystem evolvers, spiritual lodestars, and, sometimes, sharp-toothed marauders making their way through our most intimate spaces with cruel intent. But beyond their quotidian impact on our lives, synanthropes have a critical part to play in how our communities are shaped and how sustainably they will function. These creatures are ambassadors from nature, arbiters of our planet’s future, and a key influence on our species’ ongoing evolution; and something essential has shifted with them.We are entering a fraught era of environmental disruption, habitat destruction, and human population expansion that is ravaging formerly wild and untouched lands. And with that, we are becoming ever more intertwined with synanthropes, bringing chaos and danger to our doorstep. These species, so long dismissed, are forcing us to reckon with them—from the hundreds of thousands of raccoons in urban spaces that spread our refuse no matter how many "raccoon-proof" bags and bins we invent, to the invasive kudzu plants that grow a foot a day, enveloping houses, telephone poles, trees, and any other structures into their green abyss. Now, as urban spaces increasingly become wild spaces, we have a choice: continue to resist them by any means necessary, or take the opportunity to promote a more harmonious coexistence.Through vivid storytelling, Our Wild Familiars brings to spectacular life the world’s most successful synanthropes, from bats, raccoons, and crows, to some of its weirdest, including the Giant Pacific Octopus. Acting as a guide to the curious, Werb reveals how the cracks in our millennia-long efforts to shield ourselves against the outside world might just lead us to a new and necessary harmony with nature—or to an ever more savage future. More/less
The invisible siege: the rise of coronaviruses and the search for a cure
Science / Medicine / Technology
Crown
March 2022
ISBN 9780593239230
Hardcover, 370 pages
"An engrossing family history of coronaviruses and the modern-day scientific quest to conquer viral epidemics forever.
The urgency of the devastating COVID-19 pandemic has fixed humanity's gaze on the present crisis. But the story of this pandemic extends far further back than many realize. In this engrossing narrative, epidemiologist Dan Werb traces the rising threat of the coronavirus family and the attempts by a small group of scientists who worked for decades to stop a looming viral pandemic. When virologist Ralph Baric began researching coronaviruses in the 1980s, the field was a scientific backwater-the few variants that infected humans caused little more than the common cold. But when a novel coronavirus sparked the 2003 SARS epidemic, and then the MERS epidemic a decade later, Baric and his allies realized that time was running out before a pandemic strain would make the inevitable jump from animals to human hosts. In The Invisible Siege, Werb unpacks the dynamic history and microscopic complexity of an organism that has wreaked cycles of havoc upon the world for millennia. Elegantly tracing decades of scientific investigation, Werb reveals how Baric's team of scientists hatched an audacious plan not merely to battle COVID-19 but to end pandemics forever. Yet as they raced to find a cure, they ran into a complicated nexus of science, ethics, industry, and politics that threatened to derail their efforts just as COVID-19 loomed ever larger. The Invisible Siege is an urgent and moving testament to the unprecedented scientific movement to stop COVID-19-and a powerful look at the infuriating factors that threaten to derail discovery and leave the world vulnerable to the inevitable coronaviruses to come"-- More/less
