Global Health Tuesday: Connecting Health Through Impactful Storytelling

Sara McKinnon is professor of Rhetoric, Politics & Culture in the Department of Communication Arts in the College of Letters and Science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, director of the Latin American, Caribbean and Iberian Studies Program, and co-chair of the Human Rights Program. Her research is the areas of migration, legal studies, and gender and sexuality studies. She is the author of the book Gendered Asylum: Race and Violence in U.S. Law and Politics (University of Illinois Press, 2016), which charts the incorporation of gender provisions in US refugee and asylum law within the context of broader national and global politics, and co-editor of the book Text + Field: Innovations in Rhetorical Method (Penn State University Press, 2016), which considers a range of approaches for using ethnographic and field-based research methods in rhetorical research, and the forthcoming Foreign Policy Rhetorics in the Global Era: Concepts and Case Studies (Michigan State University Press, 2024).

Riley Ray Griffin is a technology reporter for Bloomberg News. Now based in San Francisco, she previously spent more than six years covering US health policy, politics and the pharmaceutical industry from both New York and Washington, and last year, she took to the campaign trail to cover the 2024 US presidential election. Riley’s coverage of the Covid-19 pandemic and US health agencies has been recognized with Loeb, National Press Club and Front Page awards. She remains fixated on the ways innovation outpaces regulation, creating key tech advances and also national security risks.

Apoorva Mandavilli is a reporter for The New York Times, focusing on science and global health. She shared in the paper’s 2021 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for coverage of the pandemic, and was also a member of the team that was a finalist for the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting. She is the 2019 winner of the Victor Cohn Prize for Excellence in Medical Science Reporting, and has won numerous other awards for her writing.

Jamie Hansen joined the Stanford Center for Innovation in Global Health in 2021. As Communications Manager, she advances and amplifies the work of the center and its fellows through compelling storytelling and strategic multimedia communications. She also builds communications and storytelling capacity among a new generation of science communicators through programs such as the Global Health Media Fellowship and Science Writing Advancing Planetary Health.

Before coming to Stanford, Jamie worked as director of communications at the Sonoma County Office of Education between 2015-2021. In this position, she developed the organization’s strategic and crisis communications capacity, supporting response to devastating wildfires and the COVID-19 pandemic, while also enhancing its capacity to listen to student voices and tell their stories.

Prior to working in communications, she covered education and the environment as a print and multimedia journalist. She holds a master’s degree in journalism from Stanford.