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Michelle Levander
Editor and Founding Director
Michelle Levander is the founding director of the Center for Health Journalism at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School of Journalism. Since she launched the Center in 2004, the professional journalists who have participated in its journalism fellowships have published more than 4,200 major investigative and explanatory articles in partnership with the Center as well as multi-outlet collaborations. Those journalism projects have won top journalism honors, changed laws, reinvigorated policy discussions, and provoked new community discussions across the nation. Under her leadership, the Center has launched initiatives that nurture collaborative reporting and engagement, building an interdisciplinary community of practice. Among the Center programs she founded, its Data Fellowship, launched in 2015, equips reporters to do their own data analysis to report investigative and explanatory stories on health and health disparities. Its engagement initiative helps reporters to build their reporting around community perspectives by relying on creative strategies to connect their voices to policy action. Levander launched the Center after more than 15 years as a staff reporter and editor in New York, California, Hong Kong, and Mexico, working for Time Magazine Asia, the Asian Wall Street Journal and the San Jose Mercury News. She has received journalism awards from the Overseas Press Club of America (Best Reporting in Latin America), the Inter American Press Association, the Society of Professional Journalists L.A. (Distinguished Work in New Media) as well as a Northern California Co-Producer Emmy Award (Spanish-language Outstanding Achievement Health Journalism). A former Inter American Press Association fellow, she spent a year in Mexico, at El Colegio de Mexico in Mexico City and Michoacán, researching migrant culture from rural Mexico. She has a bachelor’s degree in history and literature from UC Berkeley and a master’s degree from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism.
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