Liza Gross

Liza Gross is a reporter for Inside Climate News based in Northern California, author of The Science Writers’ Investigative Reporting Handbook and a contributor to The Science Writers’ Handbook, both funded by National Association of Science Writers’ Peggy Girshman Idea Grants. She has long covered science, biodiversity, agriculture, public and environmental health and justice with a focus on the abuse of science for private gain. She is a 2015 California Health Data Journalism Fellow and a 2013 Dennis Hunt Fund for Health Journalism fellow.

Articles

Environment & Climate

Dying in the Fields as Temperatures Soar

Scores of California farmworkers are dying in the heat in regions with chronically bad air, even in a state with one of the toughest heat standards in the nation.

Environmental Health

Children & Families

A catastrophic flood on California’s Central Coast has plunged already marginalized Indigenous farmworkers into crisis

Cascading climate disasters and unjust labor and immigration policies leave undocumented farm laborers without a safety net.

Environmental Health

Workers harvest cauliflower in California's Salinas Valley.

How can we better protect farmworkers as the planet warms?

Community Safety

Top of the Morning: Liza Gross Edition

Here we check in with prominent health journalists and experts to see what sites, newsletters and social media feeds they turn to first every morning. This week, we caught up with Liza Gross, freelance health journalist and senior editor of PLOS Biology. Here are her top morning reads.

Environmental Health

Healthcare Regulation and Reform

Tough Sledding: One reporter’s dogged pursuit of data from Calif.’s dangerous psych hospitals

California's psychiatric hospitals can be highly dangerous places, both for patients and staff. Lost work days and overtime pay are huge. But reporters looking to track down reliable data on assaults face an uphill climb.

Mental Health

Community Safety

Nearly 200 Napa State Hospital workers demonstrate for safer conditions in 2010.

Mental Health & Trauma

Healthcare Systems & Policy

At California psychiatric hospitals, epidemic of patients’ assaults on staff goes untreated

At California’s state psychiatric hospitals, ongoing assaults on staff by patients can make it nearly impossible to provide a therapeutic environment.

Mental Health

Patient Safety and Ethics

Using data to shed light on an invisible population

Mental Health

Are state psychiatric hospitals getting safer?

In 2010, a nurse at Napa State Hospital walked back to her ward after dinner, following the same path she’d taken hundreds of times before. But this time, she ran into a patient who should never have been allowed to roam the hospital grounds unsupervised.

Mental Health

How data reporting can help you find new angles on oft-told tales

Reporter Liza Gross was seeking a fresh way to convey the risky environmental conditions facing California farming communities. But after running into a series of data swamps, she turned to experts for help and unexpectedly found her story in the strawberry fields of Oxnard, Calif.

Poverty and Class

Environmental Health

Immigrant and Migrant Health

Fields of toxic pesticides surround schools of Ventura County — are they poisoning the students?

Oxnard and surrounding Ventura County grow more than 630 million pounds of strawberries a year. The pesticides that growers depend on—a revolving roster of caustic and highly volatile chemicals called fumigants—are among the most toxic used in agriculture.

Reporting Topics

Reporting Topics

Reporting Topics

Reporting Topics

Reporting Topics

Liza Gross

Articles

Dying in the Fields as Temperatures Soar

A catastrophic flood on California’s Central Coast has plunged already marginalized Indigenous farmworkers into crisis

How can we better protect farmworkers as the planet warms?

Top of the Morning: Liza Gross Edition

Tough Sledding: One reporter’s dogged pursuit of data from Calif.’s dangerous psych hospitals

At California psychiatric hospitals, epidemic of patients’ assaults on staff goes untreated

Using data to shed light on an invisible population

Are state psychiatric hospitals getting safer?

How data reporting can help you find new angles on oft-told tales

Fields of toxic pesticides surround schools of Ventura County — are they poisoning the students?