By Shruti Bhatt

University of Maryland researchers and faculty spoke to an audience about different concepts of disasters and how people should react when disaster strikes.

The event was part of the UMD at Home and in the World series, which is sponsored by the Office of Faculty Affairs.

Laura Rosenthal, an English professor and the event’s host, said these events help showcase the work done by UMD faculty to the rest of the campus community.

“UMD at Home and in the World brings faculty members, who are doing research on current issues affecting us today, together to explain their findings,” she said.

Among the speakers was Dr. Gary LaFree, a criminology and criminal justice professor and the head of the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START). LaFree spoke about the link between terrorism and disasters. START was created by the Department of Homeland Security and is well-known for its Global Terrorism Database, the world’s largest collection of unclassified data on terrorist incidents.

LaFree said that prior to the 9/11 attacks, developing objective data on terrorism was a problem because the definition varied so widely.

The security intelligence company Pinkerton was one of the first places where terrorism data was being collected, LaFree said. From 1970 to 1997, it trained researchers to record terrorism incidents from newspapers, government documents or wire services such as Reuters.

LaFree said he went to Pinkerton and told them that people would be interested in their data. In 2001, UMD received the data and started their own initiative, the Global Terrorism Database.

“The GTD is the longest and biggest project at START,” LaFree said.

He said the GTD is used to compare terrorism around the world by looking at statistics—like the number of terrorist attacks versus the resulting fatalities, the types of weapons used and how those weapons were obtained.

The data’s range of users includes think tanks, policymakers and non-governmental organizations such as Doctors Without Borders, which LaFree said “use the data to analyze the chance of an attack happening in a certain region.”

Boris Lushniak, the dean of the School of Public Health and the former deputy surgeon general, spoke about how infectious diseases also cause disasters.

“We often think of disasters as terrorist attacks or natural disasters,” he said. “But not infectious diseases.”

Lushniak said there are three ways an infectious disease can cause a disaster: a bioterrorism attack like anthrax, a pandemic like influenza or an outbreak of an emerging or reemerging disease like Ebola.

He said the political climate of the country can affect the response to an infectious disease. For example, during the Ebola outbreak, Lushniak said the U.S. did not have enough information on the disease.

“People ask ‘What do we do? Do we close our borders or send experts to stop it from spreading?’ So politics often play a role in these situations.”

Lushniak said taking precautions during infectious disease disasters is crucial.

“There are three things that need to happen,” he said. “People have to understand that infectious diseases are going to occur, there needs to be a sense of preparedness and there should be health communication.”

Gerard Passannante, the director of comparative literature in the English department and a scholar of Renaissance literature, explained what disaster means in a hypothetical situation.

His new book, “Catastrophizing: Materialism and the Making of Disaster,” focuses on the clash of perspectives during the Renaissance and following years.

“Catastrophe makes us think of the worst and is a style of thought that represents a sense of change,” Passannante said.

The book includes the writings and drawings of Leonardo da Vinci, who Passannante said loved disasters.

“da Vinci wrote riddles that made people question their perspectives,” he said. “The sudden collapsing of perspectives is what defines disasters.”

Passannante also showed some of da Vinci’s drawings, which depicted the crashing of waves, stylized to show the movement of something that causes drastic change.

“When a human resists, his perspective is changing and that is a disaster in the mind,” Passannante said.