Emily Baumgartner, who led the Los Angeles Times’ coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic and has written enterprising articles on a wide range of public health issues, can announce that she will be a traveling national health correspondent. I am pleased to Many of you already know Emily: She spent two years as a news assistant at the Washington bureau of the New York Times.

Emily won the National Headliners Award and was a Livingstone Awards finalist for her article on the 2019 explosion of e-cigarette smoking among teens. It also documented over 100 tobacco industry lobbyists influencing the Obama administration not to ban flavored e-cigarettes. In 2020, she dived into pandemic coverage, producing a series of news, feature stories, and investigations, including one about California’s failed campaign to stop the spread of the virus. He led the team to explain Big Tobacco’s aggressive efforts to combat the ban on menthol-flavored cigarettes, which have overly addicted black people and brought billions of dollars to the industry annually.

Emily has been interested in medicine and health since childhood. Her father was a trauma surgeon and her mother was a delivery nurse at her Yale New Haven Hospital. George earned her master’s degree in public health from the University of Washington and realized during her studies in Madagascar that she was more interested in storytelling than in her research and medical practice. . In 2014, she worked at the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting, managing health-related projects. She pitched her own idea and she reported her first article published in The Atlantic in 2016 from Freetown, Sierra Leone. There she tracked down a boy who was slowly going blind from what doctors feared was an Ebola infection lurking in his eyes. and wrote many articles for the Health Science Desk and others. She describes herself as an “infectious disease nerd at heart”.

Emily will start her new job on September 6th. She welcomes Emily back to The Times.

– Celia Dagger