Helen Branswell

Helen Branswell is a senior writer at STAT covering infectious diseases and global health; she joined STAT at its founding in 2015. Helen was introduced to epidemic reporting during the 2003 SARS outbreak; in the years since she has written about bird flu, the H1N1 flu pandemic, Ebola, Zika, polio, and measles, and now leads STAT’s coverage of the coronavirus pandemic. Helen spent the summer of 2004 embedded at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as a CDC Knight Fellow and was a 2011 Nieman Global Health Fellow at Harvard. In 2018, she won the AHCJ award for beat reporting. She was the recipient of the 2020 George Polk Award for Public Service for coverage of the Covid-19 pandemic and was awarded the 2021 Victor Cohn Prize for Excellence in Medical Science Reporting.