Sean D. Hamill is a reporter for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette who covers health care issues in the region, including a series last year about about the Pittsburgh region's largest hospital group, the non-profit UPMC, exploring how it became the region's richest landowner using tactics typically associated with for-profit hospitals. The series won the state's AP Managing Editor's Enterprise Reporting category for 2012. More recently, Sean has been investigating what went wrong at the Pittsburgh Veterans' Affairs' hospital that led to a Legionnaires' outbreak that caused at least five deaths in 2011 and 2012. His work helped spur a Congressional hearing earlier this year on the outbreak.

Sean grew up in a Pittsburgh suburb, Sewickley, along the Ohio River, the town where he returned eight years ago, after being away for 18 years attending the University of Missouri-Columbia (BJ) and Northwestern University (MJ). Between those two schools, he worked, first, for The Fulton Sun in Fulton, Mo., before working for three daily papers in Chicago after graduate school: The Daily Southtown, The Daily Herald, and, finally, the Chicago Tribune. Following the Tribune, he freelanced for three years, before he and his wife, veterinarian Joey Kallem, had their first son, Declan, now 8, and moved back to Sewickley. After taking a temporary job at the AP for six months, Sean went back to freelance, working primarily for the New York Times for four years before the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette hired him. He and his wife also have a 5-year-old son, Tadhg, three dogs, three cats, two birds and one elderly bearded dragon lizard.