Laurie Garrett


Laurie Garrett 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, chronicling the Ebola virus outbreak in Zaire.

Biography

Laurie Garrett was born in Los Angeles, California, in 1951. She graduated from San Marino High School in 1969. She then graduated with honors from Merrill College at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she received a B.S. in biology in 1975. She attended graduate school in the Department of Bacteriology and Immunology at University of California, Berkeley and did research at Stanford University with Leonard Herzenberg.
During her PhD studies, Garrett started reporting on science news for radio station KPFA. The hobby soon became far more interesting than graduate school and she took a leave of absence to explore journalism, and has never completed that degree. At KPFA, she worked in management, in news, and in radio documentary production. A documentary series she co-produced won the 1977 Peabody Award in Broadcasting, and other KPFA production efforts by Garrett, won the Edwin Howard Armstrong award.
In 1997, Garrett won a George Polk Award for Foreign Reporting, for "Crumbled Empire, Shattered Health" in Newsday, 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, 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 clinics, and the intersection of HIV/AIDS and national security. Garrett lives in Brooklyn Heights, New York City.

Published works

... which discusses the vulnerability of the world to disease, due to the lack of attention, and of funding, given to health