2022 Schedule

(Buses Load at the Limelight Hotel and Aspen Meadows, Walter Issacson Center at 7:30 AM) Follow local naturalists on a gentle walk along the pristine lake beneath the famous peaks of the Maroon Bells. Learn about the plants and animals that call this area home and the secrets to their success in the wilderness. First come, first served. Limited to 50 participants. Dress warmly!

Join a local naturalist and bird expert for a one-hour bird watching walk along the banks of the Roaring Fork River. Learn about the important roles birds play in nature and in our lives, from architectural design to pollination, to how birds are indicators of ecosystem health. Meet at the Aspen Meadows, Walter Isaacson Center. First come, first served. Limited to 25 participants.

Center yourself with an outdoor yoga practice in Anderson Park. Certified yoga instructors will lead you through a series of stretches and breathing exercises to mindfully connect you to the moment. Yoga mats will be provided.

Join us for a tour of Herbert Bayer: An Introduction—a landmark exhibition of over 150 of Bayer’s modernist masterpieces. On view through late 2022 at the new Resnick Center for Herbert Bayer Studies, the show is the first major US career-wide survey of Bayer in nearly fifty years. Operating as an exhibition space and platform for research, the Bayer Center promotes widespread appreciation for the...

In 2021—five decades after President Richard Nixon declared a War on Cancer—some 1.9 million new cancer cases were diagnosed and the scourge killed more than 600,000 Americans. Yet we have made extraordinary progress on the battlefront in the same time frame. Childhood leukemia can often be cured, death rates for colorectal, cervical, and prostate cancer have fallen by half, and treatment advances...

How crowd-sourcing can unravel a medical mystery.

The latest infectious disease scare: Should we be alarmed?

Being a parent is more challenging than ever. Workplace demands, the shortage of affordable daycare and paid leave policies, and the complexities of social media all put enormous strains on families. Yet parents have been left largely on their own to navigate the systems and build the structures their children need to thrive and often feel isolated and exhausted. Given the role that early childhoo...

A cyberattack can disrupt a hospital’s oxygen supply, disable cancer-fighting radiation therapy, divert emergency vehicles, and force surgeries to be canceled. While data security has received a lot of attention, the risk that hackers will hold basic healthcare services hostage has far greater implications for patient safety. Ransomware attacks have already struck hundreds of hospitals and are ris...

The impact of climate change is dire: floods, drought, fire, hurricanes, deforestation, degraded water systems, agricultural devastation, and refugee crises. No one will escape the health effects, as respiratory, cardiovascular, and infectious disease rates rise, water and food shortages widen, and mental health harms escalate. But communities with weak infrastructure, fragile housing, and resourc...

No doctor awakens in the morning determined to discriminate against patients of color, yet their daily clinical decisions too often have that result. Implicit bias—unconscious assumptions and stereotypes—often cause the harm. The failure to ask the right questions, listen closely and reserve judgment can sabotage communication in any patient/physician encounter, but it worsens when racial differen...

Reproductive health, critical though it is, is not the sum of women’s health. The distinctive development of female bodies across the lifespan requires targeted study to uncover the pathways of acute and chronic conditions and the treatments that will control or cure them. Women generally live longer than men, but are at greater risk of osteoporosis, Alzheimer’s disease, and stroke, and their hear...

While vaccine development was swift to combat COVID-19, just 60% of the global population has been fully immunized and viral variants remain a deadly threat, underscoring the importance of strengthening the “last mile” in vaccination. Ensuring equitable access to vaccines, overcoming structural obstacles to distribution, and combatting vaccine hesitancy will require cross-sector collaboration and...

More than $2.7 trillion worth of food, medical products, and tobacco, representing 20 percent of every dollar spent by US consumers, is regulated by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Always in the public eye, and often summoned to explain its actions to Congress, the FDA is as likely to be lauded as lambasted for its swift authorization of COVID-19 vaccines, its decision to ban menthol from...

The recent leaps of science—sequencing the human genome, advancing the world-changing technology of CRISPR, deepening knowledge of the brain—owe much to Francis Collins’s brilliant mind and steady hand. Who better, then, to talk about what transformative discoveries come next? Genomics, immunotherapy, precision medicine, new uses for mRNA technology, and other interdisciplinary, silo-busting effor...

Sixty percent of American adults, and 75 percent of children, have been infected with SARS-CoV2. Coupled with immunity-boosting vaccines and medical progress, rates of severe disease, hospitalization, and death are all falling dramatically. Can we declare victory and move on? Or do the threats still facing vulnerable populations require continued precautions? The prospect of more infectious or mor...

Modern medicine, with its prescriptive clinical guidelines, electronic health records, time pressures, and reimbursement complexities, too often leaves both patients and their doctors feeling dissatisfied. A movement is afoot to rejuvenate the healthcare ecosystem so that it works better for everyone. By aligning incentives that champion wellness and rewarding the quality of care, rather than the...

In some communities, the laundromat has become a place to get a mammogram, a blood test, or a skin cancer screening. Mental health counseling is being offered at churches, health insurance sign-ups are taking place in libraries and parks, and barbers are raising awareness of hypertension and the risk of colorectal cancer as they snip and shave. When the doctor’s office is an intimidating space or...

In the face of the pandemic, technology became an important part of how we accessed care almost overnight. Suddenly, physician video consults became standard practice, tests and devices were routinely used to diagnose and monitor disease at home, and new software was connecting people with the information they needed from the convenience of their phones or tablets. This changing landscape elevated...