Tanya Lewis
Outbreaks, transplant breakthroughs and climate-driven health threats sit at the center of Tanya Lewis’s reporting, which tracks how medicine, policy and human bodies intersect under pressure. She is a senior editor covering health and medicine at Scientific American, where she writes and edits news and features for the website and the magazine. Her work focuses on infectious disease, global health systems, biomedical innovation and the everyday risks woven through pregnancy, parenting and extreme environments.
Ebola, hantavirus and global outbreak coverage
Lewis returns repeatedly to fast-moving outbreaks, with coverage that pairs case counts and modelling with the realities of quarantine, lab work and strained health systems. In recent reporting on Ebola, she has examined how scientists estimate the potential size of a growing epidemic and why some experts warn it could become one of the worst on record. She has also detailed how a deadly Ebola outbreak has killed hundreds and why cuts to foreign aid and changes in U.S. policy are alarming public health specialists who depend on that funding. Her pieces on hantavirus follow both sides of an emerging crisis: one story describes the experience of people kept under monitoring for six weeks at a national quarantine unit, and another takes readers inside the race to build a PCR test for the Andes virus at the center of a cruise ship outbreak. Across these articles, she anchors the science in concrete situations - patients under observation, lab teams working round the clock, and health officials trying to keep up with a quickly evolving threat.
Transplant frontiers and reproductive health risks
Lewis covers organ transplantation as a frontier where new procedures collide with scarce resources and ethical questions.
She has reported on a world-first case in which a person living with HIV received a lung transplant from an HIV-positive donor, using the story to explain how clinicians are expanding options for patients with end-stage organ disease. In a major narrative feature on transplant medicine, she traces how innovations such as xenotransplantation - transferring organs from animals into people - could change the grim arithmetic of who receives lifesaving organs and who stays on waiting lists. Her reporting in this area draws on clinical advances, donor and recipient experiences and the systemic bottlenecks that determine access to care. Lewis also writes about reproductive health by focusing on evidence gaps: her coverage of what medications are safe to take during pregnancy explains how decades of research neglect have left clinicians and patients without clear guidance, and why new efforts to study drug safety in pregnant people are essential.
These pieces share a concern with how medical risks are distributed, who benefits from new technology and whose needs are still underserved by current data.
Extreme heat, hidden emissions and the human body
Another strand of Lewis’s work looks at how environmental forces and physiology collide, particularly in the context of extreme heat and climate-related hazards. In her article on why extreme heat is so deadly, she breaks down the mechanisms by which high temperatures stress the cardiovascular system, overwhelm the body’s cooling processes and disproportionately endanger older adults and people with existing health conditions.
She connects those physiological details to broader patterns, noting that heat kills more people than many headline-grabbing disasters and that warming trends are making these events more frequent and severe.
Her year-end coverage of the “wildest” things science learned about the human body collects findings on how organs, hormones and neural circuits behave in surprising ways, offering readers a survey of recent discoveries in physiology and medicine. Lewis has also covered how satellites are exposing hidden carbon emissions pouring out of oil and gas sites, tying remote sensing technology to questions about accountability, health and environmental risk.
Together, these stories reflect an interest in the invisible stresses - heat waves, pollutants, subtle bodily changes - that accumulate into major public health concerns.
Parenting, brains and the lived experience of health
Lewis frequently treats parenting and brain science as health topics shaped by social context and biology in tandem. In her reporting on how becoming a dad changes men’s brains, she explains that fathers show alterations in some of the same brain regions as mothers and that researchers are only beginning to understand the effects of parenthood on men.
She places this work within a broader gap in neuroscience research, highlighting how little is known about paternal brain changes compared with maternal ones.
Her participation in packages on what science has recently learned about the human body further reinforces this focus on everyday experiences - sleep, stress, parenting, aging - and the underlying neural and physiological mechanisms. This strand of her coverage connects laboratory findings to intimate life stages, showing how health and medicine research filters down to family-level decisions and identities.
Health and medicine editing, newsletters and audio
Alongside her reporting, Lewis plays a central editorial role in shaping health and medicine coverage at Scientific American.
She has held multiple positions on the health and medicine desk over nearly a decade, including roles as health editor, assistant news editor and associate editor at the masthead’s mind-focused publication. In her current capacity as a senior editor, she commissions, edits and writes stories across topics such as infectious disease, physiology, genetics, reproductive health and biotechnology.
She hosts or co-hosts audio series on health, including Your Health, Quickly, and has appeared on the broader Science Quickly podcast, using these formats to highlight timely medical news and explain complex findings in brief, accessible segments. Lewis also writes a weekly Health & Medicine newsletter, curating and contextualising recent coverage for readers who follow developments in care delivery, research and public health policy. Beyond Scientific American, she has written for outlets including Wired, Science News, Insider, The Scientist, Business Insider and Live Science, bringing a consistent focus on neuroscience and biotech - from genetics and prosthetics to how brains function and malfunction - to a wide range of audiences.
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Alexandra Frost
Alexandra Frost is a freelance journalist and content marketing writer who turns expert-backed health and family guidance into clear, practical service stories. She covers consumer health, wellness, nutrition, preventive care, medical research, parenting, kids’ mental health, education, products, and lifestyle. Her reporting explains concerns such as inflammation, urinary symptoms, fiber, lung cancer screening, pain treatment, mobility, family dynamics, children’s technology use, and school readiness. She profiles clinicians and scientists, connects research to everyday decisions, and focuses on what readers should watch for, ask, or change. Frost currently writes across multiple outlets, including Good Housekeeping, Cincinnati Magazine, Wirecutter, Popular Science, Success, Healthline, Parents, Women’s Health, Reader’s Digest, Today’s Parent, the Atlantic, the Washington Post, TIME, Consumer Reports, Business Insider, and National Geographic. She also works as a freelance editor, media consultant, and content strategist.
Alexandra Pattillo
Alexandra Pattillo is a freelance journalist who pairs rigorous health and science reporting with intimate accounts of patients’ lives. She covers health, science and wellness for the BBC and other major outlets, including National Geographic, The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Guardian, Outside, CNN and Inverse. Her beat includes eating disorders, women’s health, perinatal mental health, brain health, youth sports, concussion, long-term Covid symptoms, attention, habits and behavioral science. She reports on emerging treatments such as psychedelic-assisted therapy for anorexia, testing evidence, safety and relapse risk. She explains complex research in plain language and examines how it shapes everyday choices. Her reporting uses in-depth interviews with patients, families, clinicians, researchers and coaches. Through the BBC’s Health Gap column, she also covers stigma, unequal access to care and gaps between lived experience and standard medical pathways.