Michaeleen Doucleff
Michaeleen Doucleff, PhD, is a correspondent for NPR's Science Desk. For nearly a decade, she has been reporting for the radio and the web for NPR's global health outlet, Goats and Soda. Doucleff focuses on disease outbreaks, cross-cultural parenting, and women and children's health.
In 2014, Doucleff was part of the team that earned a George Foster Peabody award for its coverage of the Ebola outbreak in West Africa. For the series, Doucleff reported on how the epidemic ravaged maternal health and how the virus spreads through the air. In 2019, Doucleff and Senior Producer Jane Greenhalgh produced a story about how Inuit parents teach children to control their anger. That story was the most popular one on NPR.org for the year; altogether readers have spent more than 16 years worth of time reading it.
In 2021, Doucleff published a book, called Hunt, Gather, Parent, stemming from her reporting at NPR. That book became a New York Times bestseller.
Before coming to NPR in 2012, Doucleff was an editor at the journal Cell, where she wrote about the science behind pop culture. Doucleff has a bachelor degree in biology from Caltech, a doctorate in physical chemistry from the University of Berkeley, California, and a master's degree in viticulture and enology from the University of California, Davis.
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Dr. Chizoba Barbara Wonodi of Johns Hopkins University explains why a strategy to vaccinate everyone may not be the best approach to fighting the virus in lower-income countries such as Nigeria.
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Experts say low-risk people in the U.S. will likely be immunized before many high-risk people in poor countries.
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In 2015, the mosquito-borne virus Zika exploded in South America. Health experts predicted it would erupt in Africa. But a major outbreak never happened. Now scientists think they understand why. -
"The vaccine is on its way, folks," Dr. Anthony Fauci announced. But what about the rest of world, especially families in poorer counties. Is the vaccine "on its way for them?" -
Wealthy countries have a strategy to secure doses of any forthcoming vaccines. And that's creating a problem for lower-income nations. -
The culprit is air pollution — a problem around the globe, from homes where people cook using coal and wood to the smoky streets of San Francisco when wildfires were raging. -
On an eight-hour Emirates flight, with mask-wearing enforced, a whopping 27 coronavirus-positive people boarded the plane in Dubai. Guess how many passengers got infected? -
As scientists race to develop a vaccine specific for COVID-19, some researchers are testing an old vaccine, that's been proven safe and is cheap to manufacture, to see if it could slow the pandemic.
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As if the pandemic weren't enough, people are wondering whether climate change will cause pathogens buried in frozen ground to come back to life as the Arctic warms. How worried should we be?
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Last fall, Merck said it would stop selling its rotavirus vaccine to West Africa and redirect its supply to China at a higher price. After NPR broke the story, the situation changed — for the good.
