LaVonne Roberts

LaVonne Roberts is a health, technology, and science journalist specializing in long-form features. Her award-winning writing has been published in The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, Time, Wired, Popular Science, The Independent, Longreads, and many other publications. Roberts is a contributing author and editor of Applied Virtual Reality in Healthcare: Case Studies and Perspectives and has contributed to five anthologies. She earned her MFA in Nonfiction Creative Writing from The New School and her BA in Written Arts from Bard College, where she studied sustainability. Prior to journalism, Roberts participated in the growth and consolidation of the online industry through venture capital, private equity, and seeing startups. She was a founding shareholder of one of the earliest most trafficked websites, XOOM (XMCM), which merged with GE’s NBC Internet assets, forming NBC Internet, the first global integrated media company. Building companies that grew from mere ideas to transformative global technology has helped Roberts look through an entrepreneurial lens when writing about the intersection of science, tech, and health. Much of her writing centers on how technology isn’t just changing society — it’s changing what it means to be human. A lifelong advocate, Roberts is a trustee of The Scott-Morgan Foundation, where she advocates treatments and assistive technology for people living with ALS and extreme disabilities. She is working on a book about Dr. Peter Scott-Morgan and the future of assistive technology. You can follow her at lavonneroberts.com and on Twitter @lavonneroberts.