Laurie Garrett - Biographical Information

Biographical Information

Garrett graduated with honors in biology from the University of California, Santa Cruz. 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. Garrett never completed her PhD. At KPFA Garrett worked in management, in news, and in radio documentary production. A documentary series she co-produced with Adi Gevins won the 1977 Peabody Award in Broadcasting, and other KPFA production efforts by Garrett won the Edwin Howard Armstrong award. She won a George Polk Award for Foreign Reporting in 1997 for "Crumbled Empire, Shattered Health" in Newsday, "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".

Garrett is currently the Senior Fellow of the Global Health Program at the Council on Foreign Relations. She has worked on a broad variety of issues including SARS, avian flu, tuberculosis, malaria, shipping container clinics, and the intersection of HIV/AIDS and national security.