Award-winning journalist Laurie Garrett delivered Saward Lecture on September 16th
Stories - Aug 31 2010
Laurie Garrett was the featured speaker for the 20th Saward Lecture, held at 7:30 pm on September 16th at the Newmark Theatre in Portland. Hosted by the Kaiser Permanente Center for Health Research, the Saward Lecture is always free and open to the public.
An esteemed science reporter for National Public Radio and Newsday, Garrett is an expert on global health and has written extensively about infectious diseases including AIDS, tuberculosis, Ebola virus, measles, and whooping cough. She is the only person to hold all three of the top American journalism awards—the Pulitzer Prize, the Peabody Award, and the Polk Award.
In addition to her writing about infectious diseases for a variety of publications, including Foreign Affairs, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, Esquire, and Vanity Fair she has also authored two best-selling books about public health: The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance (1994) and Betrayal of Trust: The Collapse of Global Public Health (2000). Since 2004, Garrett has been the Senior Fellow for Global Health at the Council on Foreign Relations.
Ms. Garrett graduated with honors in biology from the University of California at Santa Cruz. While attending graduate school in the Department of Bacteriology and Immunology at the University of California, Berkeley, she became interested in journalism and soon created a niche for herself as an expert in global health, epidemics, and infectious diseases. In the years since, Ms. Garrett has frequently appeared on national television programs, including “ABC Nightline,” “PBS NewsHour,” and “Dateline.”
Kaiser Permanente’s Center for Health Research, founded in 1964, is a non-profit research institution whose mission is advancing knowledge to improve health. It has research sites in Portland OR; Honolulu, HI; and Atlanta, GA.