Contact:
Kate Ruddon
404-653-0790
kruddon@cdc.gov
CDC Foundation Announces 2002 Class of Knight Journalism Fellows at CDC
May 2, 2002, ATLANTA - Six experienced health/science journalists have been chosen for four-month fellowships to study epidemiology and public health this summer at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
Recipients of the Knight Public Health Journalism Fellowships at CDC for 2002 are:
- Sanjay Bhatt, medical reporter for The Palm Beach Post in West Palm Beach, FL
- Koren Capozza, free-lance print and radio reporter in San Francisco, specializing in health and environmental issues
- Nancy Franklin, a writer for The New Yorker magazine
- Ben Harder, reporter on health and environmental issues for Science News in Washington, D.C.
- Karen Palmer, health reporter for The Toronto Star
- Mary Ann Roser, medical reporter, Austin American-Statesman in Austin, TX
The four-month fellowship period, which begins June 24, will give the journalists a month of intensive biostatistics and epidemiology training side-by-side with members of the Epidemic Intelligence Service, CDC’s “disease detectives.” Fellows will then spend two months working with a team of scientists at CDC or its sister organization, the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry. During their stay, they will take part in outbreak investigations and conduct disease surveillance in the field. Their final month will be spent at a local or state health department, learning at the grass-roots level.
This will be the third class of fellows to go through the four-month fellowship at CDC. This year, an additional 12 journalists will be invited to attend the first 10 days of intensive classroom study as part of a new public health journalism “boot camp.”
Both programs have been made possible through a grant to the CDC Foundation from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation in Miami. The purpose of the programs is to encourage better reporting on public health issues.
Knight Fellowship Program Information
2002 CDC Knight Journalism Fellows
- Sanjay Bhatt
- Sanjay Bhatt is medical reporter for The Palm Beach Post in West Palm Beach, FL. He has covered public health there for three years, including the 2001 anthrax outbreak and 1999 cyclospora outbreak at The Breakers Hotel. He completed pre-medical studies and a bachelor’s degree in history at Duke University in May 1996. While at Duke, he went to the Middle East on a fellowship provided by the Anti Defamation League. Mr. Bhatt was an intern at The Wall Street Journal and a reporter for The Times Leader in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., before he joined the Post in 1997. He serves as a board member for the Association of Health Care Journalists.
- Koren Capozza
- Koren (cq) Capozza is a San Francisco-based free-lance journalist who writes for United Press International, The San Francisco Chronicle and the Environmental News Network, among other news outlets. She received a degree in history from the University of Pennsylvania in 1995 and has been a visiting scholar at Johns Hopkins University and California Institute of Technology. Fluent in Spanish, she spent two years reporting from Mexico and South America. Last year she received a Pew Fellowship to report on environmental issues in the high Arctic, and she is currently a contributing author to the Arctic Encyclopedia.
- Nancy Franklin
- Nancy Franklin, a staff writer for The New Yorker magazine, was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, and grew up outside of New York City. A 1978 graduate of Smith College with a degree in cell and molecular biology, she has worked at The New Yorker for twenty-three years in a variety of jobs, including editorial assistant, fact checker, and non-fiction editor. For the last eight years she has been one of the magazine’s theater critics, and she writes TV criticism as well. She has also contributed profiles and numerous “Talk of the Town” pieces to the magazine. She received the 1998 Clarion Award from the Association for Women in Communications.
- Ben Harder
- Ben Harder reports on the environment, nutrition and public health for Science News magazine and frequently contributes to NationalGeographic.com. He has worked for U.S. News & World Report and was formerly the editor of Let’s Go, Inc., the guidebook publisher that produces Let’s Go Europe and other travel titles. He received his degree in biological anthropology from Harvard University in 1999. Prior to college, Ben traveled around the world and worked on a reconstructed 1812 warship that sails the Great Lakes.
- Karen Palmer
- Karen Palmer is health policy reporter for The Toronto Star. She has also worked at The Sarnia Observer, London Free Press and Globe and Mail, where her team was nominated for a national newspaper award for spot news. Born and raised on a hobby farm outside London, Ontario, Ms. Palmer joined the Star after receiving her journalism degree in 1999 from Carleton University in Ottawa. After working in the city hall bureau, she moved to the health policy beat in October 2001. She spent December 2000 on assignment in Africa, following a doctor who was setting up clinics to treat sleeping sickness.
- Mary Ann Roser
- Mary Ann Roser of The Austin American-Statesman took over the medical beat in July 2000 after covering higher education at the paper for several years. In the 1980s and ’90s she worked for The Lexington Herald-Leader, where she was education reporter and Washington correspondent, and for The Fort Worth Star-Telegram as capital bureau reporter. She received her degree in English literature from the University of Cincinnati in 1979.
The CDC Foundation is an independent, non-profit enterprise that forges effective partnerships between CDC and others to fight threats to health and safety.
For more information, contact:
Carol Gentry, Director
770-488-8442