Laurie Garrett (born 1951) is an American science journalist and author. She was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Journalism in 1996 for a series of works published in ''

Newsday ''Newsday'' is an American daily newspaper that primarily serves Nassau and Suffolk counties on Long Island, although it is also sold throughout the New York metropolitan area. The slogan of the newspaper is "Newsday, Your Eye on LI", and f ...

'' that chronicled the Ebola virus outbreak in Zaire.

Biography

Laurie Garrett was born in Los Angeles, California, in 1951. She was graduated from San Marino High School in 1969. She earned a B.S. degree in biology with honors from Merrill College at the University of California, Santa Cruz, in 1975. Garrett enrolled in a Ph.D. program in the department of bacteriology and immunology at the University of California, Berkeley, but abandoned her studies to be a journalist.

Professional career

KPFA KPFA (94.1 FM) is an American listener-funded talk radio and music radio station located in Berkeley, California, broadcasting to the San Francisco Bay Area. KPFA airs public news, public affairs, talk, and music programming. The station sign ...

, she worked in management, in news, and in radio documentary production. A documentary series she co-produced (with

Adi Gevins Adi Gevins is a San Francisco Bay Area-based radio documentarian, producer, educator, archivist, and creative consultant who has been referred to as the "fairy godmother of community radio". Radio career Gevins has won an Ohio State Award, an Ameri ...

) won the 1977

Peabody Award The George Foster Peabody Awards (or simply Peabody Awards or the Peabodys) program, named for the American businessman and philanthropist George Peabody, honor the most powerful, enlightening, and invigorating stories in television, radio, and ...

in broadcasting. Other KPFA production efforts by Garrett, won the Edwin Howard Armstrong award. In 1996, Garrett was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Journalism for a series of works published in ''Newsday'' that chronicled the Ebola virus outbreak in Zaire. In 1997, she won a George Polk Award for foreign reporting, for "Crumbled Empire, Shattered Health" in ''

'', described as "a series of 25 articles on the public health crisis in the former Soviet Union". She won another Polk award in 2000 for her book ''Betrayal of Trust'', "a meticulously researched account of health catastrophes occurring in different places simultaneously and amounting to a disaster of global proportions". In 2004, Garrett joined the

Council on Foreign Relations The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) is an American think tank A think tank, or policy institute, is a research institute that performs research and advocacy concerning topics such as social policy, political strategy, economics, mi ...

as the senior fellow of the Global Health Program. She has worked on a broad variety of public health issues including SARS, avian flu, tuberculosis, malaria,

shipping container clinic A shipping container clinic is a type of shipping container architecture using intermodal containers (shipping containers) as the structural element of a medical clinic that can be easily deployed to remote regions of the world. Shipping containers ...

s, the intersection of

HIV The human immunodeficiency viruses (HIV) are two species of '' Lentivirus'' (a subgroup of retrovirus) that infect humans. Over time, they cause acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS), a condition in which progressive failure of the immu ...

and

AIDS Human immunodeficiency virus infection and acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (HIV/AIDS) is a spectrum of conditions caused by infection with the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), a retrovirus. Following initial infection an individual m ...

, and national security. On June 27, 2021, an interview with Garrett comprised an entire episode of

TWiV ''This Week in Virology'' (abbreviated as ''TWiV''; ) is a science podcast founded and hosted by Vincent Racaniello with co-hosts Brianne Barker, Rich Condit, Dickson Despommier, Alan Dove, and Kathy Spindler. The podcast, which began in 2008, c ...

, This Week in Virology, in which she discussed many facets of the SARS-CoV-2, (also known as Covid-19) pandemic, comparisons with earlier epidemics, as well as, prospects for the future of public health.

Personal

Garrett lives in the Brooklyn Heights neighborhood of New York City. She related during the June 2021 TWiV interview that she had been motivated to change to studying science in college by a promise made to her mother, who was dying of cancer.

Selected works

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References

External links