Lauryn Higgins
Lauryn Higgins is a public health journalist whose work at Flow Space focuses on the emotional and practical realities of living with complex health conditions, with a particular emphasis on women’s health and wellness. Her reporting draws a straight line from scientific research and clinical practice to the day-to-day decisions women make about their bodies, ambitions, and identities. She combines long-form service pieces with reported features that centre lived experience and evidence in equal measure.
Living With Metastatic Breast Cancer
At Flow Space, Higgins writes directly about what it means to remain yourself while living with metastatic breast cancer, treating identity and autonomy as core health questions rather than side issues.
Her work in this area moves beyond treatment explanations to examine how diagnosis reshapes relationships, work, and self-perception, and how women can protect a sense of continuity in their lives while navigating intensive care. The tone is grounded and pragmatic, reflecting her broader public health background, and keeps the focus on what readers can control in the face of a long-term illness. She approaches serious disease as a chronic reality to be managed, not only as a medical event, which makes her coverage especially relevant for stories that intersect clinical care with quality of life.
Women’s Midlife Health, Ambition, and Mental Load
A distinct strand of Higgins’s Flow Space work examines how ambition changes for women in midlife and how those shifts connect to health, mental load, and burnout. In a widely shared piece on midlife ambition, she writes about the science behind why women might turn down promotions or extra projects, framing those choices as recalibration rather than failure or exhaustion.
She builds these arguments on interviews with clinicians and workplace experts, unpacking how stress, caregiving, hormonal change, and evolving values intersect.
Her coverage extends into perimenopause and mental health, including reporting on research that finds women in perimenopause significantly more likely to experience depression than those who are premenopausal. In these stories she translates findings from journals such as the Journal of Affective Disorders into clear language, spelling out risk factors, symptom patterns, and practical steps for getting support.
This combination of workplace psychology, hormone health, and emotional wellbeing gives her midlife reporting a broad canvas: she positions ambition and mood as health outcomes shaped by policy, culture, and physiology, not simply personal willpower.
Evidence-Based Public Health and Wellness Across Outlets
Beyond Flow Space, Higgins maintains an extensive portfolio of public health and wellness reporting for major outlets, and that experience shapes the depth of her health coverage overall.
Her work tracking the coronavirus for The New York Times was part of a team that won the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service, and she has also contributed to Pulitzer-winning coverage of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. In interviews and professional bios she is described as a two-time Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist whose reporting focuses primarily on public health and wellness.
That data-driven background is visible in her health features, which routinely anchor narrative sections with clear statistics, study citations, and expert voices.
Her bylines span outlets including NPR, Women’s Health, Shape, Time, Parents, Health.com, Teen Vogue and Ambrook, alongside ongoing freelance and teaching work in journalism.
For Time, she writes reported explainers on topics such as strength training as an “anti-ager” and the link between gut health and mood, combining clinical insight with practical advice for readers. For Ambrook, her work connects public health to climate and agriculture, such as a piece on how climate change in Texas threatens food security and farm communities. Across these platforms she maintains a consistent focus on how structural factors - policy, environment, workplace conditions - shape individual health outcomes, rather than treating wellness as a purely personal project.
Professional bios and social profiles describe her as a public health journalist who balances freelance reporting with academic teaching and ongoing stringing work for national newsrooms. That blend of roles informs the way she frames stories: she writes with an educator’s clarity, a data reporter’s rigour, and a service journalist’s attention to what information readers can act on. Taken together, Higgins’s body of work offers a distinctive mix of lived-experience narratives, midlife and women’s health reporting, and evidence-rich public health analysis that is well suited to stories requiring both empathy and scientific precision.
4 more health journalists.
Alanna Smith
Alanna Smith is a national health reporter whose work links health policy and politics to real access to care, with a constant focus on health equity, infectious disease and the toxic drug crisis. She reports for The Globe and Mail on infectious diseases, hospitals and long-term care, mental health, drug policy and the pressures on health systems in Western Canada. Her stories connect big-picture decisions to patients, families, front-line workers and volunteers, showing how funding, privatization and federal standards shape public care. She has covered trauma care inequities, proposed public‑private models in Alberta, drug toxicity and overdose policy, respiratory virus surges, measles elimination, gene‑editing advances and gender‑affirming health care laws. Her work combines narrative reporting, data, legal and policy analysis, and has been recognized by national journalism and press freedom organizations.
Allan Levine
Allan Levine is a historian and author whose journalism uses the past to explain present-day issues. He writes for the Winnipeg Free Press, including the Now & Then column, which examines current events through history. His subjects include public health, disease, medical treatment, health systems, politics, social conflict, strikes, wars, antisemitism and Canadian public life. His polio reporting traces Manitoba epidemics, hospital pressures, treatment, mortality and the arrival of vaccines through archival data and medical history. He also writes about the Winnipeg General Strike and Jewish communities, including discrimination, rights and security. His work draws on books about Canadian political leaders, Jewish history and the wartime economy, including The Dollar A Year Men. He writes long-form, analytical pieces that combine dates, statistics, policy decisions and narrative storytelling to connect people and institutions with broader historical change.
Angela Amato
Angela Amato is a digital news producer with CTV News, and her coverage is distinct for linking health research and public safety concerns to legal and policy decisions that shape daily life. She reports on health, justice, politics, business, arts and culture, crime and public-interest stories. Her health work covers academic and clinical research, including studies on vaping and lung blood flow, exercise tolerance and early heart dysfunction in young adults. She also reports on motorcycle gang arrests, homicide and death investigations, Indigenous justice stories, wildfire evacuations, ambulance contracts, property taxes, labour negotiations and political advocacy rules. She explains complex findings in plain language and stays close to documents, data and expert sources. Her background includes investigative and daily newsrooms, and she has earned nominations for national journalism awards.
Apoorva Mandavilli
Apoorva Mandavilli covers the collision of infectious disease science, vaccine policy and public health agencies for The New York Times, following how research, regulation and politics shape outbreaks and access to vaccines. She reports on science and global health with a steady focus on infectious diseases and pandemics, including Covid-19, mpox, H.I.V., malaria and tuberculosis, treating them as ongoing global threats. Her work explains complex epidemiology and virology in clear narratives about risk, evidence and the consequences of scientific decisions. She repeatedly returns to vaccine policy, law and misinformation, tracing how court fights and agency disputes affect immunization schedules and public trust. She also reports on global health programs, funding cuts and inequity in care and technology. A longtime science journalist and former founding editor in chief of Spectrum, she has written widely on science and health and received major honors for medical science reporting and pandemic coverage.