Amy Maxmen, public health local editor and correspondent, covers efforts to prevent disease and improve well-being outside of the medical system, and the obstacles that stand in the way. Before joining KFF Health News in 2024, she was a senior reporter at Nature covering health inequities, global health, infectious diseases, and genomics. She’s also written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, Bloomberg Businessweek, National Geographic, and many other outlets. Maxmen’s work has garnered awards such as a Victor Cohn Prize for Excellence in Medical Science Reporting, and an AAAS Kavli Science Journalism Award. She was the 2022-23 Edward R. Murrow Press fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, a 2020 Knight Science Journalism at MIT fellow, and the recipient of several grants from the Pulitzer Center that allowed her to report on outbreaks in Myanmar, Sierra Leone, Sudan, and elsewhere. She earned a Ph.D. from Harvard University in evolutionary biology.