Maryn McKenna is an independent journalist and author who specializes in domestic and global public health, health policy and medicine. She is a contributing writer at the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy of the University of Minnesota and was recently named an Ochberg Fellow of the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma at Columbia University.
From 1995-2006, she was a national desk writer at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, where she was the only U.S. journalist assigned to full-time coverage of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and embedded with a CDC investigative team during the 2001 anthrax-letter attacks. She has reported from the Indian Ocean tsunami and from Hurricane Katrina, as well as from Southeast Asia, India, Africa and the Arctic. She has covered pandemic influenza since 1997, when she wrote the first story in the American media on the potential threat posed by avian flu H5N1.
Previously, she worked for the Boston Herald, where stories she co-wrote on illnesses among veterans of the first Persian Gulf War led to the first Congressional hearings on Gulf War Syndrome, and at the Cincinnati Enquirer, where her stories on the association between local cancer clusters and contamination escaping a federal nuclear weapons plant contributed to a successful nuclear-harm lawsuit by residents.
Ms. McKenna is a cum laude graduate of Georgetown University and has a master’s degree with highest honors from Northwestern University. She has held fellowships with the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation and with the Knight-Wallace Fellows program of the University of Michigan, as well as serving short fellowships at Harvard Medical School and the Casey Journalism Center on Children and Families at the University of Maryland. In 2006, she was an inaugural Health Journalism Fellow of the East-West Center in Honolulu and is now an Associate of the Center and teaches other journalists in its programs.
Ms. McKenna has won numerous journalism awards and is the author of Beating Back the Devil: On the Front Lines with the Disease Detectives of the Epidemic Intelligence Service, which was named one of the Top Science Books of 2004 by Amazon.com and NPR’s Science Friday and an "Outstanding Academic Title" by the American Library Association. Her second book, Superbug, will be published by Free Press (Simon & Schuster) in March 2010.
