Advisory Board

Bob Ortega (Board Chair) is a senior writer for CNN Investigates, covering border and immigration issues from Phoenix. He joined CNN after a long career as an investigative journalist, most recently spending nearly six years at the Arizona Republic as a specialty writer covering the border and focusing on child welfare. He also served as managing editor for the Honolulu Civil Beat, which focuses on accountability journalism. He began his journalism career as a television reporter in Fairbanks, Juneau, and Anchorage and later moved into print journalism at the Anchorage Times. He later served as managing editor of the Homer News before moving to the Seattle Times and the Wall Street Journal, where he reported on child labor and other issues. While at the Journal, he wrote "In Sam We Trust: The Untold Story of Sam Walton and Walmart, the World's Largest Retailer." He served as a Knight International Press Fellow in Paraguay and has trained journalists in 17 countries on four continents over 10 years. He has received the Hillman Prize for social justice reporting; the Ancil Payne Award for Ethics in Journalism; and the Sidney Award for reporting on a deeply flawed and widely used screening test for cervical cancer. He has also been a professor of journalism at Ryerson University in Toronto. He grew up in Mexico City. He has a degree in history from Princeton University and graduate degree from Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism. He was a 2014 Center for Health Journalism National Fellow.

Tracie Potts (Vice Chair) became executive director of the Eisenhower Institute at Gettysburg College in October 2021.  The institute promotes nonpartisan discourse and critical analysis of issues of long-term importance, educating and engaging the public, and preparing undergraduates to assume their responsibility as global citizens. Previously, she worked as a Washington correspondent for NBC News Channel for almost 25 years, reporting on the federal government, the administration, Congress and important consumer and health topics. She began her career as a local health reporter at WAFF 48 News in Huntsville, Alabama and also worked as an anchor and reporter at local NBC and ABC stations in Alabama and Tennessee. She was a 2017 Center for Health Journalism National Fellow and is vice chair of the Center’s Advisory Board.  She has been a fellow of the National Press Foundation, the Poynter Institute and the Journalism Center on Children and Families. She won the Michelle Clark Fellowship from the Radio Television Digital News Foundation and has twice received NBC’s “Ovation” Award for outstanding employee contributions. She has taught journalism at Knoxville College and Biola University and edited the debut issue of “Influence” magazine. She earned bachelor and master of science degrees from Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism.

Bill Allman is chief digital officer of Jump Shift Digital, a digital strategy consulting firm. Previously, he was chief digital officer for DIA GLobal (formerly the Drug Information Association) charged with identifying, developing and implementing DIA’s digital strategy to create digital products and services that enhance DIA’s relevance and global impact. Before that, he served for eight years as the chief digital officer for Smithsonian Enterprises, where he was cited as one of the "100 most innovative CDOs globally.” His other professional experiences include vice president of digital media for Bonnier Corp, chief content/creative officer for HealthCentral.com, senior vice president and general manager of interactive media for Discovery.com and founding general manager for US News & World Report. He began his career as a journalist, helping create an award-winning consumer publication for the American Association for the Advancement of Science and writing several books on neuroscience and evolution. He has bachelor’s degrees in English and biology from Brown University.

Neil Bedi is a reporter at ProPublica in Washington, D.C., where he covers the federal government. He was previously an investigative reporter at the Tampa Bay Times. His 2020 National Fellowship project with 2016 National Fellow Kathleen McGrory focused on a local predictive policing program in Pasco County, Florida that harassed residents and profiled schoolchildren. It received the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for Local Reporting and led to a federal investigation and the forming of a coalition of 30 national and state organizations to oppose the program. His 2018 investigation with Kathleen into the alarming death rate at the cardiac surgery unit of a Florida children’s hospital won the George Polk Award and was a finalist for the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting. He has also been honored with the Scripps Howard Award, the IRE Award, the Taylor Family Award for Fairness in Journalism and the National Headliner Award for Journalistic Innovation. Before becoming a journalist, he was a software developer. He studied computer science at the University of California, Los Angeles School of Engineering. 

Samuel Belilty is vice president of news for Univision WLTV 23 Miami. He previously served as news director at KUVN, Univision Dallas, the highest rated newscast in the Dallas area, from January 2014 to October 2017. He has more than 25 years of experience in broadcast television, both in front of and behind the camera. He previously worked as news director at KWEX, Univision San Antonio; creative services director, executive producer and news director at KFTV, Univision Fresno; and network news production manager and manager of a special reports unit at RCTV (Caracas, Venezuela). He has received EMMY, Edward R. Murrow, Gabriel, Telly and ADDY Awards, in addition to several national awards in Venezuela. He earned a bachelor's degree in mass communication from Universidad Central de Venezuela and has done postgraduate studies in organizational development and bilingual/bicultural studies.

Otis W. Brawley, MD, is a globally recognized expert in cancer prevention and control. He has worked to reduce overscreening of medical conditions, which has revolutionized patient treatment by increasing quality of life and reducing health disparities. He joined Johns Hopkins University as a Bloomberg Distinguished Professor in 2019 from the American Cancer Society, where he was chief medical and scientific officer and executive vice president for the American Cancer Society from 2007 to 2018 and a key leader in the society’s work to eliminate disparities in access to quality cancer care. He also was medical director of the Georgia Cancer Center for Excellence at Grady Memorial Hospital in Atlanta and deputy director for cancer control at Winship Cancer Institute at Emory University. His research focuses on developing and ensuring the effectiveness of cancer screening strategies. He has championed efforts to decrease smoking and implement other lifestyle risk reduction programs, as well as to provide critical support to cancer patients and concentrate cancer control efforts in areas where they could be most effective. He currently leads a broad interdisciplinary research effort on cancer health disparities at the Bloomberg School of Public Health and the Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center, striving to close racial, economic and social disparities in the prevention, detection, and treatment of cancer in the United States and worldwide. He also directs community outreach programs for underserved populations throughout Maryland. He is a graduate of University of Chicago’s Pritzker School of Medicine and completed his internship at University Hospitals of Cleveland, Case-Western Reserve University; his residency at University Hospital of Cleveland; and his fellowship at the National Cancer Institute.

Daniel Chang is a health reporter for The Miami Herald and was a 2014 National Health Journalism Fellow at the Center for Health Journalism. He grew up in South Florida reading The Herald. He earned a bachelor's degree in English from Florida International University, where he volunteered on the student newspaper. After graduation, he began his journalism career in 1995 at the Orange County Register. In 2000, he joined The Herald, initially covering arts news and Spanish-language TV. He began covering healthcare in 2013. His Fellowship project, which was supported by Dennis A. Hunt Fund for Health Journalism, focused on the uninsured population in Miami-Dade County, which has a highly competitive and disjointed safety net system.

Anh Do covers Asian American issues and general assignments at the Los Angeles Times. A second-generation journalist, she has worked at the Seattle Times, the Orange County Register and Nguoi Viet Daily News, the largest Vietnamese-language newspaper in the United States founded by her late father. Born in Saigon, she is a graduate of USC with degrees in journalism and English and she has reported from Cuba, India, Mexico, Peru and Vietnam. Her writing on race and culture has won awards from Columbia University, the Asian American Journalists Association and Freedom Newspapers Sweepstakes Award. She is a recipient of Yale's Poynter Fellowship in Journalism. Apart from words, she's passionate about all things canine and has spent 26 years in dog rescue around the globe.

Jan Gurley, M.D is a writer, an internal medicine physician and a public health leader. She works for the San Francisco Department of Public Health, where she has held a variety of leadership roles. She is a deputy health officer and currently works as special project advisor and chief information officer in communicable disease and prevention. From 2018-2020, she was director of public health emergency preparedness and response for San Francisco. Gurley also has worked as a practicing physician and the medical director of clinics serving communities disproportionately impacted by structural racism, homelessness and trauma. She has been medical director of Curry Senior Center, a clinic for geriatric patients experiencing homelessness in SF's Tenderloin district, as well as medical director of Potrero Hill Health Center. As a Center for Health Journalism 2010 California Fellow, she produced a series of multimedia articles for SFGate, which won the Saffron Media Award. Her writing has been published in a wide variety of platforms, ranging from the New England Journal of Medicine to Salon. Views expressed by her are her own and not those of the department of public health. After medical school at Harvard and residency training at the University of California at San Francisco, she received a Robert Wood Johnson joint UCSF/Stanford fellowship in epidemiology, public policy and ethics.

Kathleen McGrory is a reporter at ProPublica. She was previously an investigative reporter and editor at the Tampa Bay Times, where she and Neil Bedi won the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for Local Reporting for their reporting on a local policing program used to monitor and harass residents. The series also won the Scripps Howard Award for Local/Regional Investigative Reporting and was finalist for the 2021 Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting. Their prior series on problems at Johns Hopkins All Children's Hospital was a finalist for the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting and won the 2019 George Polk Award for Local Reporting and an IRE award. As a 2016 Center for Health Journalism National Fellow, she reported “In Harm’s Way,” revealing for the first time that between 2010 and 2015 firearms killed or injured nearly 3,200 kids in Florida. She recently joined the Center’s Advisory Board. She started her career at the Miami Herald, where she covered breaking news, education and government. She is a graduate of Hamilton College and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. 

Hugo Morales, JD, is the founder (1976) and executive director of Radio Bilingüe, the National Latino public radio network. Headquartered in Fresno and Oakland, the network provides a national satellite service in English, Spanish, Mixteco, Triqui and Hmong. It serves more than half a million listeners with its pioneering daily Spanish-language national talk show, Línea Abierta; its independently produced news service, Noticiero Latino; and its offerings of Latino traditional folk music. Radio Bilingüe has a dozen full-power FM radio stations in Texas, Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico and California and more than 100 radio station affiliates in North America. His awards include a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in 1994 and an Edward R. Murrow Award, one of the broadcast industry's highest honors, in 1999. In 2006, he received the Cultural Freedom Prize from the Lannan Foundation, established “to recognize people whose extraordinary and courageous work celebrates the human right to freedom of imagination, inquiry, and expression.” He serves or has served on the boards of The California Endowment, The National Alliance for Hispanic Health, the California Postsecondary Education Commission, Accrediting Commission for Senior Colleges and Universities of the Western Association of Schools and Colleges, The Rosenberg Foundation, The San Francisco Foundation and the Fresno County First 5 Commission. He graduated from Harvard College and Harvard Law School and has received honorary doctorates from California State University at Fresno and California State University at Sacramento. 
 

Carmen Rita Nevarez, MD, MPH, is senior vice president of external relations and preventive medicine at the Oakland-based Public Health Institute (PHI). She is creator and director of Dialogue4Health.org, which partners with local, national and global organizations to host online health conversations and share critical resources. She directs the Center for Health Leadership and Practice, building collaborative leadership capacity in local communities through the National Leadership Academy for the Public’s Health; the California Leadership Academy for the Public’s Health; the California Overdose Prevention Network, strengthening opioid safety coalitions across California; and the newly launched National Overdose Prevention Network. Her areas of expertise include teen pregnancy prevention, health disparities, Latinx health, obesity, chronic disease prevention and health reform. Before joining PHI, she served as the director of Berkeley's Health and Human Services Department and as a special assistant to the dean at the UC Berkeley School of Public Health. She served as president of the American Public Health Association in 2010. A gynecologist and preventive medicine specialist, she maintained a part-time clinical practice for 40 years.

Ex officio

Willow Bay is dean of the USC Annenberg School of Journalism and a professor of professional practice. A veteran television journalist, digital news editor and author, she is a special correspondent for Bloomberg Television and a senior strategic advisor for The Huffington Post. From 2007 to 2014, she was a senior editor at Huffington Post and managed editorial content and growth initiatives for the online news and commentary site. She was formerly an anchor for CNN Moneyline, CNN & Entertainment Weekly and CNN & Fortune; executive producer and host of Lifetime Television's "Spotlight 25;" anchor and freelance reporter for NBC News and MSNBC; co-anchor of ABC's "Good Morning America" Sunday edition; a correspondent for ABC's "World News Saturday" and "World News Sunday; cohost of "NBA Inside Stuff;" and a correspondent for NBC's "Today Show.” She graduated cum laude from the University of Pennsylvania with a bachelor’s degree in literature and received a master’s degree from New York University’s Stern School of Business.

Michelle Levander is founding director of the Center for Health Journalism and editor-in-chief of its online community. She co-teaches a graduate health journalism course at the USC Annenberg School of Journalism. Since she launched the Center in 2004, its journalism Fellows have published more than 2,000 articles in partnership with the Center.  Fellows’ stories have won awards, changed laws, invigorated policy discussions and provoked new community discussions nationwide. Under her leadership, the Center has launched initiatives that nurture collaborative reporting projects and engagement, building an interdisciplinary online community of practice. She 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). As an Inter American Press Association fellow, she spent a year at Mexico City's El Colegio de México, where she researched migrant culture in rural Mexico. She earned a bachelor’s degree in history and literature from UC Berkeley and a master’s degree from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism.