During the peak of the Ebola crisis, the recovery process in Africa was not going according to plan. Failure after sobering failure forced health consultant Shalini Unnikrishnan to recognize that they had approached the crisis from the wrong direction. In this impassioned talk, she urges the response to the next pandemic to be centered on the people it impacts rather than the virus that spreads the disease. She advocates for a new approach that will infuse scientific procedures with the emotion, tradition and belief that are inextricably intertwined when crises are both global and local at once.