Health and Science Reporting

Climate change. COVID-19. Sports psychology. Dark matter. Addiction. Personal tech. As a health and science reporter, you get to indulge your curiosity about the world and shed light on some of the biggest stories of our time.

You’ll mine data to find new perspectives on social issues, from maternal mortality to gun violence, and explore the impacts of climate change and the coronavirus pandemic.

You’ll police the $3 trillion spent each year on U.S. health care, money that too often benefits hospitals, insurers, and pharmaceutical companies instead of sick people.

You’ll sift through research, eliminating jargon and hype. You’ll also interview top experts in fields from infectious disease to robotics, and tell dramatic human stories, through audio and video, data visualizations, and well-constructed narratives.

FAQs

Health and Science Reporting at Newmark J-School
Play VideoHealth and Science Reporting at Newmark J-School
Why Do Animals Eat Their Poop?
Play VideoWhy Do Animals Eat Their Poop?

Watch more videos produced by students
in our “Out of Curiosity” playlist.

No. Many of Newmark J-School’s most successful health and science alumni majored in journalism or the humanities in college.

Our Faculty

Pauliina Siniauer at refugee restaurant

Student Work

Here’s a sampling of work that Health & Science students produced for class and later published:

  • Audrey Carleton, ’21, published her capstone on the health impacts of abandoned oil wells in Capital & Main.
  • Anny Oberlink, ’21, explored a loophole that allows the U.S. military to conceal its carbon emissions, or “bootprint.” Her story was published in Popular Science.

  • The global healthcare climate footprint is huge, but in the science journalism class Yara El Murr ’20 wrote about emerging solutions, a story she then sold to The Guardian.

  • In the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, Sophie Putka, ’20, learned that ants–which, like us, are social animals–instinctively adopt behaviors that reduce infection, including disinfection and social distancing. She successfully pitched the story to Discover.
  • Kara Brown, ’19, wrote for the Introduction to Health Journalism class about the need to protect one’s scalp with sunscreen and later published it in Well + Good.
  • Ben Powers, ’19, investigated the psychology of cringiness for the Science Journalism class, and Popular Science bought the story.
  • Molly Enking, ’18, revealed in PBS NewsHour the lengths to which women go to give birth naturally after a previous C-section, because doctors often consider the practice riskier than it really is.
  • Amy Mackinnon, ’18, described in Tonic an increasingly common eating disorder called diabulimia, in which people with type 1 diabetes lose weight by skipping their insulin shots, often with devastating health consequences.
  • Lori Freshwater, ’17, and Brett Dahlberg, ’17, wrote an expose in the Village Voice about a New York doctor who sexually abused patients.

Watch videos produced by students

Contact Us

Do you have a question about the Health and Science program? If so, please contact us.

Emily Laber-Warren
Director of Health and Science Reporting
emily.laberwarren@journalism.cuny.edu