Extra Credit

Laurie Garrett
Posted 3-09-09

GREENSBORO, N.C. — Pulitzer winner Laurie Garrett, author of the bestseller “The Coming Plague,” will speak at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday, March 31, in the Sullivan Science Building.

Sponsored by the UNCG Institute for Community and Economic Engagement, Garrett’s appearance is free, open to the public, and part of the university’s Science and Society Lecture Series. Seating will be available on a first-come basis with parking available in the McIver Street deck.

Garrett will speak in the 300-seat Jaylee Montague Mead Auditorium. A reception and book signing will follow in the adjacent Mead Gallery.

To learn more, visit scienceandsociety.uncg.edu, email researchpartners@uncg.edu or call (336) 334-4623.

As a medical and science writer for Newsday, in New York City, Laurie Garrett became the only writer ever to have been awarded all three of the Big “Ps” of journalism: The Peabody, The Polk (twice) and The Pulitzer.

She is the best-selling author of “The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance” (1995) and “Betrayal of Trust: The Collapse of Global Public Health” (2001).

Since March 2004, Garrett has been a senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations. She is an expert on global health with a particular focus on newly emerging and re-emerging diseases and their effects on foreign policy and national security. Her website is http://lauriegarrett.com.

Garrett was born in Los Angeles, a fifth generation Los Angeleno. She earned a bachelor’s in biology with honors from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and attended graduate school in the Department of Bacteriology and Immunology at UC Berkeley and did research at Stanford University.

She started reporting on science news at local radio station KPFA while a graduate student and soon took a leave of absence to explore journalism. She never completed her PhD.

At KPFA, Garrett worked in management, news and radio documentary production. A documentary series she co-produced with Adi Gevins won the 1977 George Foster Peabody Award in Broadcasting, and other KPFA production efforts by Garrett won the Armstrong and Corporation for Public Broadcasting awards.

After leaving KPFA, Garrett worked briefly in the California Department of Food and Agriculture, assessing the human health impacts of pesticide use. She then went overseas, living and working in southern Europe and sub-Saharan Africa, freelance reporting for Pacifica Radio, Pacific News Service, BBC-Radio, Reuters, the Associated Press and others.

She joined National Public Radio in 1980, working out of the network’s San Francisco and Los Angeles bureaus as a science correspondent. She left NPR in 1988 to join the science writing staff of Newsday, where she remained until 2004. She was a visiting fellow in the Harvard University School of Public Health during the 1992-93 academic year.

She has contributed chapters to numerous books, including “AIDS in the World” (1993) and “Disease in Evolution: Global Changes and Emergence of Infectious Diseases” (1994). Her work has been published in Foreign Affairs, Esquire, Vanity Fair, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post and Current Issues in Public Health.

She has appeared frequently on national television programs, including ABC Nightline, The Jim Lehrer NewsHour, The Charlie Rose Show, The Oprah Winfrey Show, Dateline, The International Hour (CNN) and Talkback (CNN).

Garrett is a member of the National Association of Science Writers and served as the organization’s president during the mid-1990s. She lives in Brooklyn Heights, New York City.