Laurie Garrett, the 2005 Arthur Ashe Visiting Professor.
Award-winning journalist and author Laurie Garrett will be presenting the Arthur Ashe Visiting Professor Lecture, hosted by the Department of Medicine at Weill Cornell Medical College, on December 8 at 11 a.m. in Uris Auditorium. The topic of her lecture is "AIDS: The Lessons Not Learned, and the Perils That We Face."
Garrett is recognized as one of the leading journalists to have chronicled issues of global and public health, with a particular focus on newly emerging and re-emerging diseases, including AIDS, the Ebola virus, and SARS, for which she delivered the Jill and Ken Iscol Distinguished Environmental Lecture, hosted by Cornell University and held at the Medical College, in 2003. She is a senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations, and best-selling author of "The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance" and "Betrayal of Trust: The Collapse of Global Public Health." Garrett is the only writer ever to have been awarded all three of the "Big Ps" of journalism: The Peabody, The Polk (twice) and The Pulitzer.
Garrett graduated from the University of California at Santa Cruz with a degree in biology. During her Ph.D. studies in bacteriology and immunology at the University of California at Berkeley, she began reporting on science news at KPFA, a local radio station. Finding journalism more interesting than graduate school, Garrett joined KPFA full time, eventually winning the 1977 George Foster Peabody Award in Broadcasting for co-producing a documentary series called "Science Story." In 1998, she received the George C. Polk Award for International Reporting, for "Crumbled Empire, Shattered Health," a series of 25 articles on the public health crisis in the former Soviet Union. In 2000, she received the Polk Award again for Best Book, for her report on the weakened global public-health infrastructure in "Betrayal of Trust." Garrett won the 1996 Pulitzer Prize for Exploratory Journalism for her embedded reporting of the Ebola outbreak in Zaire.
Garrett has received multiple awards and honors, and holds two honorary doctorates. She has written for numerous publications, including Newsday, 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 "Nightline," "News Hour with Jim Lehrer," "The Charlie Rose Show," "The Oprah Winfrey Show," "Dateline," and CNN's "The International Hour" and "Talkback."