Officers

President
Ivan Oransky, M.D.
Vice President, Editorial, Medscape
New York

Ivan Oransky, M.D., is vice president, editorial at Medscape and Distinguished Writer In Residence at New York University’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. He also blogs at Embargo Watch and at Retraction Watch. Formerly, he was global editorial director at MedPage Today, executive editor at Reuters Health, managing editor for online at Scientific American and deputy editor of The Scientist.

He received his bachelor's degree from Harvard University, where he was executive editor of The Harvard Crimson, his medical degree from New York University, and completed an internship at Yale before leaving medicine to be a full-time journalist. A 2012 TEDMED speaker, he is the recipient of the 2015 John P. McGovern Medal for excellence in biomedical communication from the American Medical Writers Association, and in 2017 was awarded an honorary doctorate in civil laws from The University of the South (Sewanee). Oransky, who holds an appointment at the NYU School of Medicine as a clinical assistant professor of medicine, has taught at the City University of New York Graduate School of Journalism and has written for publications from Nature to the New York Times. He lives in Massachusetts with his wife (and fellow AHCJ member) Cate Vojdik, whom he met at an AHCJ conference. He was first elected to the board in 2002. You can follow him at @IvanOransky.

Vice President 
Felice J. Freyer
Health Care Reporter, The Boston Globe
Boston

Felice J. Freyer is chair of AHCJ's Right to Know Committee. A health care reporter for The Boston Globe, she covers mental health, addiction, and brain science. Previously, she was the medical writer for The Providence (R.I.) Journal. Her honors have included second place in AHCJ’s Awards for Excellence in Health Care Journalism, a Kaiser Media Fellowship and the “Master Reporter” award from the New England Association of Newspaper Editors. Follow her on Twitter at @felicejfreyer and on Facebook.

Treasurer
Gideon Gil
Managing Editor, Enterprise & Partnerships, Stat
Boston

Gideon Gil is chair of AHCJ's Finance and Development Committee. He is managing editor for enterprise and partnerships at Stat, a Boston-based online publication covering health, medicine, and life sciences. He was the health and science editor at The Boston Globe for a decade and a medical reporter and an editor at The Courier-Journal in Louisville, Ky., for 19 years, and had a hand in three Pulitzer Prizes. A 2014-15 Knight Science Journalism fellow at MIT, he lives in Wellesley, Mass. Gil, elected to the board in 2011, was chair of the local planning committee for Health Journalism 2013, and leads AHCJ’s Boston chapter. You can follow him at @GideonGil.

Secretary
Julie Appleby, M.P.H.
Senior Correspondent, Kaiser Health News
Washington, D.C.

Julie Appleby, M.P.H., is a senior correspondent with Kaiser Health News. Prior to that, she spent 10 years covering the health care industry beat for the business section of USA Today. She has been a chair of AHCJ's annual Awards for Excellence in Health Care Journalism contest since its inception. Appleby has worked at the San Francisco Chronicle, the Financial Times in London and the Contra Costa Times in Walnut Creek, Calif. Her reporting has led to several awards. You can follow her at @Julie_Appleby.

Directors

Immediate Past President
Karl Stark
Business News Editor, The Philadelphia Inquirer
Philadelphia

Karl Stark is business news editor at The Philadelphia Inquirer. He has worked as The Inquirer's health editor, pharmaceuticals reporter, national/foreign editor and covered health care extensively as a business reporter. He has won many awards for his investigative work, including the National Press Club's Consumer Story of the Year. His work on a Pennsylvania-based health system triggered a criminal probe that resulted in plea bargains by top managers for misusing restricted medical endowment funds. Stark was one of four authors of AHCJ's "Covering the Quality of Health Care – A Resource Guide for Journalists." He serves on AHCJ's Finance and Development Committee. Stark was a media fellow of the Kaiser Family Foundation in 2000, enabling him to write about medical errors and quality. A former collegiate tennis player, he likes to think he still has game. You can follow him at @KWStark.

Jeanne Erdmann
Independent Journalist
Wentzville, Mo.

Jeanne Erdmann is an award-winning health and science writer based in Wentzville, Mo. Her work has appeared in Discover, Women’s Health, Aeon, Slate, The Washington Post, Nature, Nature Medicine and other publications. She is co-founder of The Open Notebook, a craft-focused website for science and health writers. She is the chair of AHCJ's Freelance Committee. You can follow her at @jeanne_erdmann.

Carrie Feibel
Senior Editor, Science Desk, NPR
Washington, D.C.

Carrie Feibel is a senior editor on NPR's science desk. Previously, she was the health editor at KQED, San Francisco’s NPR station and she spent six years covering health at Houston Public Radio. She also has worked for the Houston Chronicle, The (Bergen, N.J.) Record, and the Associated Press in New York City. Since 2010, she has been part of a health reporting collaborative between NPR, Kaiser Health News, and public radio stations across the country.

Marlene Harris-Taylor
Reporter/Producer, WVIZ/PBS Ideastream
Cleveland

Marlene Harris-Taylor joined the Cleveland public radio and television outlet in 2016 after four years at The Toledo Blade and earlier work at WBGU-Bowling Green, Ohio. She was a 2016-17 AHCJ Regional Health Journalism Fellow. Harris-Taylor was awarded the Ohio Excellence in Journalism prize for Best Health Writer from the Cleveland Press Club for a series of articles concerning the Affordable Care Act and how it is transforming the health care industry. She spent several years as a producer for NPR's Morning Edition program in Washington, D.C. She tweets at @marlenetaylor48.

Scott Hensley
Writer and Editor, NPR
Washington, D.C.

Since the summer of 2009, Scott Hensley has been running Shots, NPR's online health channel, and done some radio work. Before that, he was the founding editor of The Wall Street Journal's Health Blog. He covered the drug industry and the Human Genome Project for the Journal. Later, he wrote an online column about the business of health and edited stories for the paper and WSJ.com. Previously, he was a reporter at Modern Healthcare and American Banker. In a past career, he oversaw clinical trials for a maker of high-tech medical devices. He has a bachelor's degree in natural sciences from Johns Hopkins University and a master's in journalism from Columbia University. Hensley serves on AHCJ's Finance Committee. You can follow him at @ScottHensley.

Tony Leys
Health Care Reporter, Des Moines Register
Des Moines, Iowa 

Tony Leys has been the Des Moines Register’s main health care reporter since 2000. He also writes about social-welfare issues and dabbles in political coverage during Iowa’s presidential caucus season. He previously spent 10 years as a Register assignment editor, including stints overseeing state and political coverage. He grew up in the Milwaukee area and graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He was a 2011-12 AHCJ Regional Health fellow, and he has reported from Haiti, Afghanistan, Guatemala, Uganda and Mali. You can follow him at @TonyLeys.

Maryn McKenna
Independent Journalist
Atlanta

Maryn McKenna is an independent journalist who specializes in public health, global health and food policy. She is a columnist for Wired’s Ideas section, a columnist for Scientific American and a long-form and investigative writer for Self, the Atlantic, the Guardian, Nature, and other publications in the United States, Europe and Asia. She is the author of the 2017 bestseller, “Big Chicken: The Incredible Story of How Antibiotics Created Modern Agriculture and Changed the Way the World Eats” (National Geographic 2017). She is the author of "Superbug: The Fatal Menace of MRSA" (Free Press/S&S 2010) and "Beating Back the Devil: On the Front Lines with the Disease Detectives of the Epidemic Intelligence Service" (FP/S&S 2004). She is a senior fellow of the Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism at Brandeis University. Previously, she was a newspaper reporter, working for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Boston Herald, The Cincinnati Enquirer and Rockford Register-Star. She has held fellowships with the Dart Center on Journalism and Trauma, the East-West Center, the Kaiser Family Foundation and the Knight-Wallace Fellows of University of Michigan. She serves on AHCJ's Freelance Committee. You can follow her at @MarynMcK.

Sabriya Rice
Knight Chair of Health & Medical Journalism, University of Georgia
Athens, Ga.

In 2018, Sabriya Rice was named the Knight Chair of Health & Medical Journalism in the Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Georgia. She previously was a health business reporter at The Dallas Morning News, wrote about quality and safety at Modern Healthcare and was a health producer with CNN for eight years. She was a member of the inaugural class of AHCJ Fellows on Comparative Effectiveness Research in 2015. As a freelance producer with Quest Network’s Blue Zones, she traveled the world writing about longevity. You can follow her at @sabriyarice.

Executive Director

Len Bruzzese
Association of Health Care Journalists
Columbia, Mo.

AHCJ Executive Director Len Bruzzese also is an associate professor at the Missouri School of Journalism and serves on the executive committee of the Council of National Journalism Organizations. Bruzzese, a founding staff member of USA Today, spent 20 years in daily journalism before entering the nonprofit and academic worlds. He served as deputy director of Investigative Reporters and Editors and the National Institute for Computer-Assisted Reporting for seven years before helping base AHCJ at Missouri in 2005. He is co-author of "The Investigative Reporter's Handbook," (fourth edition), and has edited 15 reporter beat books focused on different reporting topics of use to daily journalists. He has won several newspaper and magazine editing awards and was named Outstanding Alumnus in Journalism by the University of Alabama at Birmingham. Bruzzese's journalism career included writing, editing and management stints at USA Today, The Clarion-Ledger (Jackson, Miss.), the Pensacola News Journal and Gannett News Service (Washington, D.C.). His final daily newspaper position was as editor of The Olympian in Olympia, Wash.