Board of Directors
Officers |
|
President 
Charles Ornstein, AHCJ's board president, is a senior reporter at ProPublica, a nonprofit investigative news organization based in New York. Prior to joining ProPublica in 2008, he was a member of the metro investigative projects team at the Los Angeles Times. In 2004, Ornstein was a lead author on a series on Martin Luther King Jr. /Drew Medical Center, a troubled hospital in South Los Angeles. The articles won the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service, the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award and the Sigma Delta Chi Award for Public Service. In 2009, Ornstein co-authored a series of stories that detailed serious failures in oversight by the California Board of Registered Nursing and nursing boards around the country. The work was a finalist for the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service. Ornstein's most recent project, Dollars for Docs, was awarded the 2010 Gannett Award for Innovation in Watchdog Journalism from Investigative Reporters & Editors. Ornstein is an adjunct professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. He previously worked at The Dallas Morning News, where he covered health care on the business desk and worked in the Washington bureau. Born in Detroit, Ornstein attended the University of Pennsylvania, majoring in history and psychology. In 1999-2000, he was a Media Fellow with the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, examining the future of the employer-sponsored health insurance system. You can follow him at @CharlesOrnstein.
|
|
Vice President 
Karl Stark, vice president of AHCJ's board, is the assistant managing editor, health and science, 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. He writes weekly jazz reviews for The Inquirer. A former collegiate tennis player, he likes to think he still has game. You can follow him at @KWStark.
|
|
Treasurer
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. He also holds appointments as an adjunct professor of journalism and clinical assistant professor of medicine at New York University. He lives in New York City 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 and chairs AHCJ's Finance and Development Committee. You can follow him at @IvanOransky.
|
|
Secretary 
Julie Appleby, M.P.H., secretary of AHCJ's board, 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 |
|
Felice J. Freyer 
Felice J. Freyer is chair of AHCJ’s Right to Know Committee, which has been leading the association’s efforts to improve access to information. As a medical writer for The Providence (R.I.) Journal, she covers health care from every angle, including public policy, primary care, mental health, research and finance. Her honors have included second place in AHCJ’s Excellence in Health Care Journalism awards, a Kaiser Media Fellowship and the “Master Reporter” award from the New England Association of Newspaper Editors. She is an active tweeter on health care and open government; you can follow her at @felicejfreyer and on Facebook.
|
|
Phil Galewitz 
Phil Galewitz, a senior correspondent at Kaiser Health News, is chair of AHCJ's Membership Committee. Before joining KHN in June 2009, Galewitz was a health writer for The Palm Beach Post. In 2004-05, he was a Kaiser Media Fellow and spent the year researching and writing about community solutions to the uninsured. Galewitz was a national heath writer with The Associated Press and worked as a health writer for The Patriot-News in Harrisburg, Pa. He has contributed to several national magazines, including Self, Redbook and Glamour. Galewitz has won a number of awards for his work. He has a bachelors' degree in health planning and administration and a master's in public administration with an emphasis in health policy, both from Pennsylvania State University. You can follow him at @PhilGalewitz.
|
|
Gideon Gil
Gideon Gil has been the health and science editor at The Boston Globe since 2003, overseeing print and online coverage of health care, medicine, science and the environment. Before that, he worked for 19 years as a medical reporter and an editor at The Courier-Journal in Louisville, Ky., where he was part of the team that won a 1989 Pulitzer Prize for coverage of a bus crash that killed 27 people. He lives in Wellesley, Mass. Gil, elected to the board in 2011, is chair of the local planning committee for Health Journalism 2013, and of AHCJ’s Boston chapter. He also serves on AHCJ's Membership Committee. You can follow him at @GlobeGideon.
|
|
Scott Hensley
|
|
Carla K. Johnson
|
|
Maryn McKenna is an independent journalist who specializes in public health, global health and food policy. She blogs for Wired and is 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 "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 was recently named 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 is the chair of AHCJ's Freelance Committee. You can follow her at @MarynMcK.
|
|
Andy Miller
Andy Miller, editor of Georgia Health News, serves on AHCJ's Freelance Committee and serves as president of the organization's Atlanta chapter. He has been a health care journalist since 1992. He was The Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s main health care reporter from that time until May 2009, when he retired from the newspaper. He has been working as a freelancer for publications that include Kaiser Health News, AARP Bulletin, WebMD, msnbc.com, Arthritis Today, and AOL’s WalletPop, where he writes a column, Dollars & Health. From 2001 to 2002 he was a Kaiser Family Foundation Media Fellow, studying indoor air quality and its effect on health. He has won numerous awards for health care reporting. In addition to his freelance work, he is developing a nonprofit health journalism news service that will focus on Georgia health care news, called Georgia Health News. Prior to his journalism career, he was a social studies teacher and basketball coach at a North Carolina middle school and high school. He has an undergraduate degree in history from Duke University, and a master’s in teaching, also from Duke. He is married and lives in Atlanta. You can follow him at @gahealthnews.
|
|
Irene Wielawski 
Irene Wielawski, a founder of AHCJ, is an independent writer and editor specializing in health care and policy topics. Previously, she was a medical writer for newspapers, including the Providence Journal-Bulletin and the Los Angeles Times, where she served on the investigations team. Her independent work (www.irenewielawski.com) appears in The New York Times, Columbia Journalism Review, Health Affairs and peer-reviewed journals and books. She has produced medical segments for public television and reviews manuscripts for Health Affairs. Honors include two team Pulitzer Prizes and a Pulitzer finalist citation for medical journalism. Wielawski is co-chair of AHCJ’s Right to Know Committee and also serves on the Freelance and the Finance and Developmentcommittees. You can follow her at @wielawski.
|
Executive DirectorLen Bruzzese 
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.
|
Ivan Oransky, M.D., treasurer of AHCJ's board, is executive editor at Reuters Health and he blogs at 
Since the summer of 2009, Scott Hensley has been running 
Carla K. Johnson, a medical writer at The Associated Press, has covered health and medicine since 2001 and has been an AHCJ member nearly that long. In 2003, she joined the board of the organization and has worked as the board's liaison to AHCJ's local chapters. A 1980 graduate of the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, she has worked as a copy editor and covered the education beat. She worked many years at the daily newspaper in Spokane, Wash., before returning to her native Illinois to join the AP. You can follow her at 
