Bullard, chair of Hillyer's math and science department, cumulatively has spent years investigating, documenting, theorizing, and writing or co-writing fascinating and important books such as The Silver Bridge Disaster of 1967, A Day-by-Day Chronicle of the 2013-2016 Ebola Outbreak, and Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima: Curse of the Nuclear Genie. The processes that led to those literary accomplishments are often as intriguing as the topics he shares with his students—and he’s just as animated talking about them.
Bullard’s newest book has just been published. COVID-19: The First Six Months presents a day-by-day chronicle of the pandemic's worldwide and increasingly menacing progression, documenting the epidemiological, medical, social, and cultural impacts of the lethal virus as it spread around the globe.
“I’ve always been interested in medicine, especially emergency medicine,” Bullard says when asked what led him to this newest literary topic. “I certified as an EMT twice and actually used to hang out in the library of the Centers for Disease Control when I was working on my dissertation in Atlanta.”
He did, in fact, share some of his methods for working on the COVID book with his students. “I spent some time explaining the publishing process to them using my new book as an example,” he explains. “They were very interested, as few had experience with any kind of publishing, let alone scientific publishing.” While researching the book, Bullard often spent between eight and twelve hours a day recording data and making daily entries about the disease in his notes.
With a bachelor’s degree in marine biology and a PhD in marine sciences from the University of North Carolina, Bullard’s interests may have begun with aquatic life, but have since spread out to many other organic and geologic areas. As the new book makes its way into the academic marketplace, he will continue work on another major project. He has collected in excess of 12 years of data about animal attacks and has started drafting a series of shark attack books geared toward a young readership.
COVID-19: The First Six Months, which uses an impressive array of highly informed and experienced sources and references, delivers a detailed, chronological account of the first half-year of the pandemic, providing a fascinating case study of the disease’s outbreak.
Bullard reminds us that “the most interesting, yet terribly scary, fact is that it only took 75 days for COVID-19 to go from being first seen to causing the entire world to shut down.”