Sonya Collins is an independent journalist covering health care, medicine, and biomedical research. She is a regular contributor to WebMD Magazine, WebMD.com, CURE,GenomePharmacy Today, and Yale Medicine. Her stories have also appeared in Scientific American, Georgia Health News, and publications served by the Georgia Public Health News Bureau.

While earning an M.A. in Health & Medical Journalism at the University of Georgia, Sonya was selected for the summer internship as a writer at Yale Medicine Publications. She was also a two-time science writing fellow at research conferences sponsored by the National Academies of Science. Her reporting has won awards for Excellence in Health Care Journalism from the Association of Health Care Journalists and a Robert G. Fenley Writing Award from the Association of American Medical Colleges.

Before becoming a journalist, Sonya earned an M.F.A. in creative writing at The New School, where she was a teaching fellow. She has also taught writing at Hunter College of the City University of New York, where she earned her B.A., and at the University of Georgia. During her teaching stint at UGA, she contributed an article on author Elizabeth Gilbert (Eat, Pray, Love) to the Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Fiction (2010).

Fluent in Portuguese, Sonya has translated literary and scholarly texts for publication.  She lived in Brazil for two years, where she wrote a collection of essays about life on the island of Florianópolis.

Articles

<p>I used to be a language teacher (English &amp; Portuguese) before I became a journalist. And with each story I tell, I see how not-so-far-apart my present and former professions are.</p>

<p><p>Beth Heath's biggest frustration as Madison County nurse manager is when she can't help someone, when she has to turn someone away.</p><p>"There are patients that leave [the health department], and we worry about them because we don't know what they're going to do," said Heath.</p>

<p>Patients go out of their way to see Yale ophthalmologist James C. Tsai, M.D., M.B.A. One traveled four-and-a-half hours from Long Island. Another takes a car service each week from Garden City, N.Y., for post-operative care. For his weekly follow-ups, a Wall Street trader journeys to New Haven each Wednesday on the Metro-North Railroad.</p>

<p>The Cushing Center, new home to the Cushing Tumor Registry, opened its doors to visitors during the annual reunion in June. Fifteen years in the making, the combined museum, archive, and seminar space, located two floors below ground within the Cushing/Whitney Medical Library, is arguably as unique as the collection itself.</p>