Pam Belluck

Last updated
Pam Belluck
NationalityAmerican
Alma mater Princeton University, Harvard and MIT
Occupation(s)Journalist, author

Pam Belluck, an American journalist and author, is a health and science writer for The New York Times and author of the nonfiction book Island Practice, which is in development for a television series. Her honors include sharing a Pulitzer Prize and winning the Nellie Bly Award for Best Front Page Story.

Contents

Belluck’s coverage of the coronavirus pandemic has focused on the devastating effects of COVID-19 and the experience of COVID survivors, including long-term symptoms. She has written frequently about “long COVID” and brain-related conditions like delirium, psychosis and brain fog. She has also written about children’s experiences with COVID. Several of her coronavirus articles were honored with a 2020 Front Page Award from the Newswomen’s Club. Her coronavirus coverage has been featured on The Daily, the popular New York Times podcast, including episodes about a mysterious children’s inflammatory syndrome, the science of reopening schools and long COVID.

Belluck also writes about neuroscience, dementia, genetics, reproductive health, mental illness and other subjects. Her work on Ebola with several colleagues won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting and other awards. Her project about surgery for women traumatized by genital cutting won the 2019 Nellie Bly Award for Best Front Page Story, a 2020 New York Press Club Award and other honors.

Education

Belluck is a graduate of Princeton University with a degree in international relations from the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs and a minor in East Asian studies. She was a Fulbright Scholar in the Philippines, a Case Media Fellow at Indiana University, and she won a Knight Journalism Fellowship to spend the 2007–08 academic year at Harvard and MIT.

Career

Before joining the Times, Belluck was a staff writer for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and The Philadelphia Inquirer , and a freelance writer for The San Francisco Chronicle. In California, she served as a Southeast Asia correspondent, based in Manila and reporting from China, Burma, Thailand, South Korea, and Hong Kong.

She was part of a team of reporters at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution whose work was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for general news, and part of a team of reporters at The Philadelphia Inquirer whose work was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for general news.

She was chosen to be a Ferris Professor of Journalism at Princeton University in 2014, and was a member of the TEDMED Editorial Advisory Board from 2015 to 2020.

She has given talks and appeared on panels at universities and medical schools, the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, the Aspen Institute, the Simons Foundation, the Santa Fe Science Writing Workshop, the American Museum of Natural History, conferences in Mexico, Canada, and Ireland, and on a voyage to the Galapagos Islands.

Belluck is also a jazz flutist and performs regularly in New York City with the jazz group Equilibrium.

The New York Times

Belluck joined The Times’s science department in 2009 after more than a decade as a New York Times national bureau chief, leading the paper's Midwest and New England bureaus. She often investigates complex or controversial subjects, including gene editing, reproductive health, infectious disease, and mental illness.

Her work launched the Times's Vanishing Minds series, for which she traveled to mountain villages in Colombia to write about the world's largest family to experience Alzheimer's, to South Korea to write about innovative dementia care, and to a California men's prison where first-degree murderers care for inmates with dementia. Her two-part series Mother’s Mind showed, through months of sensitive, difficult reporting, that maternal mental illness is much more common and varied than previously thought, and that health providers should be better at detecting trouble and ensuring women receive help. It has helped spur efforts to screen women for maternal depression and assist them in getting treatment.

A three-month investigation by Belluck found that morning-after pills do not induce abortions, contrary to claims by some anti-abortion activists. Another investigative scoop revealed a prominent American scientist's interaction with the Chinese researcher whose highly controversial experiment produced the world's first gene-edited babies. Other groundbreaking stories have focused on people with severe mental illness obtaining psychiatric advance directives and a scientist whose baby has a rare, devastating mutation on the very gene the scientist studies.

She has also written about offbeat topics: the sexism of office air conditioning systems, custom-fit condoms, floating islands, the world’s oldest shoe, and the place with the longest name in America: Lake Chargoggagoggmanchauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg. Her story about a lost cat that somehow navigated 200 miles home inspired someone to write a children’s book. Belluck also contributes to multimedia, video and podcast projects for The New York Times.

Her reporting about scientists using their children as research subjects that was chosen for The Best American Science Writing, and one of the only sports stories she’s ever written (about fish shooting in Vermont) was somehow picked for The Best American Sports Writing.

Island Practice

Belluck is the author of the non-fiction book Island Practice, published in June 2012 by PublicAffairs. [1] The book is a true tale about a colorful and contrarian doctor on Nantucket who has performed surgery with scalpels he carved from obsidian, made house calls to a hermit who lived in an underground house and a vine igloo, treated patients ranging from Kennedy relatives to a sheep with a prolapsed uterus, and diagnosed everything from tularemia to toe-tourniquet syndrome. In July 2012, Imagine Entertainment optioned the book to develop a TV series with 20th Century Fox Television, and in August 2012 the medical drama was bought by CBS. [2] In 2014, the book was optioned for television by Original Film and CBS.

Awards and honors

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Louise Erdrich</span> American author (born 1954)

Karen Louise Erdrich is an American author of novels, poetry, and children's books featuring Native American characters and settings. She is an enrolled member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians, a federally recognized tribe of Ojibwe people.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Nellie Bly</span> American investigative journalist (1864–1922)

Elizabeth Cochrane Seaman, better known by her pen name Nellie Bly, was an American journalist, who was widely known for her record-breaking trip around the world in 72 days in emulation of Jules Verne's fictional character Phileas Fogg, and an exposé in which she worked undercover to report on a mental institution from within. She was a pioneer in her field and launched a new kind of investigative journalism.

<i>Arrowsmith</i> (novel) 1925 novel by Sinclair Lewis

Arrowsmith is a novel by American author Sinclair Lewis, first published in 1925. It won the 1926 Pulitzer Prize. Lewis was greatly assisted in its preparation by science writer Paul de Kruif, who received 25% of the royalties on sales, although Lewis was listed as the sole author.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sylvia Nasar</span> American journalist (b. 1947)

Sylvia Nasar is an American journalist. She is best known for her biography of John Forbes Nash Jr., A Beautiful Mind, for which she won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography. Nasar is Knight Professor Emerita at Columbia University's School of Journalism.

Richard Read is a freelance reporter based in Seattle, where he was a national reporter and bureau chief for the Los Angeles Times from 2019 to 2021. A two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, he was a senior writer and foreign correspondent for The Oregonian, working for the Portland, Oregon newspaper from 1981 to 1986 and 1989 until 2016.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Deborah Blum</span> American journalist

Deborah Blum is an American science journalist and the director of the Knight Science Journalism program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is the author of several books, including The Poisoner's Handbook (2010) and The Poison Squad (2018), and has been a columnist for The New York Times and a blogger, via her blog titled Elemental, for Wired.

John M. Crewdson is an American journalist. He won a Pulitzer Prize for The New York Times, where he worked for 12 years. He subsequently spent 26 years in a variety of positions at the Chicago Tribune.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Laurie Garrett</span> American science journalist and author (born 1951)

Laurie Garrett is an American science journalist and author. She was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Journalism in 1996 for a series of works published in Newsday that chronicled the Ebola virus outbreak in Zaire.

Nancy Coover Andreasen is an American neuroscientist and neuropsychiatrist. She currently holds the Andrew H. Woods Chair of Psychiatry at the Roy J. and Lucille A. Carver College of Medicine at the University of Iowa.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Helene Cooper</span> Liberian-born American journalist

Helene Cooper is a Liberian-born American journalist who is a Pentagon correspondent for The New York Times. Before that, she was the paper's White House correspondent in Washington, D.C. She joined the Times in 2004 as assistant editorial page editor.

<i>Ten Days in a Mad-House</i> American literature by Nellie Bly

Ten Days in a Mad-House is a book by American journalist Nellie Bly. It was initially published as a series of articles for the New York World. Bly later compiled the articles into a book, being published by Norman Munro in New York City in 1887.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sheri Fink</span> American journalist

Sheri Fink is an American journalist who writes about health, medicine and science.

Donald Gerard McNeil Jr. is an American journalist. He was a science and health reporter for The New York Times where he reported on epidemics, including HIV/AIDS and the COVID-19 pandemic. His reporting on COVID-19 earned him widespread recognition for being one of the earliest and most prominent voices covering the pandemic.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Meg Kissinger</span> American investigative reporter

Meg Kissinger is an American investigative journalist and a Visiting Professor at Columbia University.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Caroline Fraser</span> American writer

Caroline Fraser is an American writer. She won the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography, and the 2017 National Book Critics Circle Award in Biography, for Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder, a biography of American author Laura Ingalls Wilder.

Kevin Sack, an American journalist, is a senior reporter for The New York Times.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Alexandra Brewis Slade</span> New Zealand-American anthropologist

Alexandra Brewis Slade is a New Zealand-American anthropologist, professor, and author who studies how health reflects the interaction of human biology and culture. Her research and community outreach seeks sustainable solutions to complex global health and environmental challenges, such as mental health and water insecurity. She is an advocate for a reduction of stigma in global health practices. She writes under the name Alexandra Brewis.

Anne Harrington is an American science historian and the Franklin L. Ford Professor of the History of Science at Harvard University. Her primary research area is the history of psychiatry, neuroscience, and cognitive science.

Helen Branswell is a Canadian infectious diseases and global health reporter at Stat News. Branswell spent fifteen years as a medical reporter at The Canadian Press, where she led coverage of the Ebola, Zika, SARS and swine flu pandemics. She joined Stat News at its founding 2015, leading the website's coverage of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.

References

  1. ↑ "Home". islandpracticebook.com.
  2. ↑ Andreeva, Nellie (August 10, 2012). "CBS Buys Medical Drama Based on Book 'Island Practice'". Deadline.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.