As a medical and science writer for Newsday, in New York City, Laurie Garrett became the only writer ever to have been awarded all three of the Big "Ps" of journalism: The Peabody, The Polk (twice), and The Pulitzer. Laurie is also the best-selling author of The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance and Betrayal of Trust: The Collapse of Global Public Health. In March 2004, Laurie took the position of Senior Fellow for Global Health at the Council on Foreign Relations. She is an expert on global health with a particular focus on newly emerging and re-emerging diseases; public health and their effects on foreign policy and national security.

Garrett has been honored with two doctorates in humane letters honoriscausa, from Weslayan Illinois University and the University ofMassachussetts, Lowell.

Garrett is the author of The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance and Betrayal of Trust: The Collapse of Global Public Health. She is a medical and science writer for Newsday, in New York City.

Garrett was born in Los Angeles, a 5^th generation Los Angeleno. She graduated with honors in biology from the University of California in Santa Cruz. She attended graduate school in the Department of Bacteriology and Immunology at UC Berkeley and did research at Stanford University in the laboratory of Dr. Leonard Herzenberg. During her PhD studies, Garrett started reporting on science news at KPFA, a local radio station. The hobby soon became far more interesting than graduate school and she took a leave of absence to explore journalism. Garrett never completed her PhD.

At KPFA Garrett worked in management, in news and in radio documentary production. A documentary series she co-produced with Adi Gevins won the 1977 George Foster Peabody Award in Broadcasting, and other KPFA production efforts by Garrett won the Armstrong and CPB Awards.

After leaving KPFA Garrett worked briefly in the California Department of Food and Agriculture assessing the human health impacts of pesticide use. She then went overseas, living and working in southern Europe and subsaharan Africa, freelance reporting for Pacifica Radio, Pacific News Service, BBC-Radio, Reuters, Associated Press and others.