Rebecca Hersher
Rebecca Hersher (she/her) is a reporter on NPR's Science Desk, where she reports on outbreaks, natural disasters, and environmental and health research. Since coming to NPR in 2011, she has covered the Ebola outbreak in West Africa, embedded with the Afghan army after the American combat mission ended, and reported on floods and hurricanes in the U.S. She's also reported on research about puppies. Before her work on the Science Desk, she was a producer for NPR's Weekend All Things Considered in Los Angeles.
Hersher was part of the NPR team that won a Peabody award for coverage of the Ebola epidemic in West Africa, and produced a story from Liberia that won an Edward R. Murrow award for use of sound. She was a finalist for the 2017 Daniel Schorr prize; a 2017 Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting fellow, reporting on sanitation in Haiti; and a 2015 NPR Above the Fray fellow, investigating the causes of the suicide epidemic in Greenland.
Prior to working at NPR, Hersher reported on biomedical research and pharmaceutical news for Nature Medicine.
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Exposure to the tiny fibers in asbestos can lead people who work around the material to develop mesothelioma, a cancer of the thin membranes that line the chest and abdomen. -
A New York City hospital has created a playlist of songs with the ideal tempo for CPR, although previous research suggests there is more to good chest compressions than just the right tempo. -
A father brought his teenage son back from the capital. The boy fell ill. The parents blamed an attack by a magical leopard. But it was Ebola. -
A woman is thought to be spreading Ebola in a remote village. So health workers spend four hours trekking through the bush to track her down. By the time they make it, it's too late. -
A 65 percent increase in a woman's weight is associated with a 9-percent drop in earnings. A recent study investigated what's behind that "obesity penalty," and why it hits women harder than men. -
Getting around Monrovia, Liberia's congested capital, has become more challenging since the Ebola outbreak began. Passengers and drivers tell NPR how they're coping. -
Bypassing commercial sperm banks, thousands are logging on to websites where women can connect with men at no cost. Anecdotes abound, but the scope of the unregulated activity is unclear.
