The Consumer Health Interactive editorial team brings decades of experience and a Pulitzer Prize to the task of creating reliable and engaging health content. Our writers and editors have worked for many of the nation's largest daily newspapers, trade journals, consumer health magazines (like Hippocrates and the national award-winning magazine Health) and for the largest print and online providers of health information, including WebMD.

Writers for Consumer Health Interactive specialize in health and medical reporting and have a bachelor or master's degree or its equivalent in the fields of journalism, English, public health, biology, or medicine. Some are physicians specializing in family medicine, pediatrics, senior health, geriatrics, and neonatology.

Editors for Consumer Health Interactive specialize in health and medical editing and writing. Senior editors have the equivalent of a master's degree and/or doctorate in journalism and an undergraduate degree in English, biology, history, or a related field. Some also have a background in biology and medical research.

Our editorial staff thoroughly researches and fact-checks all the content we write, including primers, Web site reviews, special reports, interactive quizzes, and calculators. Everything we create is also reviewed for accuracy and safety by our medical advisory board. We also offer daily health news from Reuters, and full-text articles from more than a hundred magazines and journals, such as the Diabetes Forecast, Nutrition Action, and American Family Physician.

For more information regarding our Editorial Guidelines and Conflict of Interest Policy, click here.

CHI's Editorial Team

Diana Hembree, Editor in Chief

Diana Hembree is an award-winning health and medical journalist with more than 15 years' experience, including three years as a senior editor at Hippocrates, then a national magazine for physicians published by Time Inc. Health. She served for more than a decade as a news editor and reporter at the Center for Investigative Reporting in San Francisco, working on health-related stories for CBS's '60 Minutes,' PBS's Frontline, the Times of London syndicate, and dozens of newspapers and magazines. While at CIR, she also worked with local and national TV stations and served as associate producer for Frontline's 'The Great American Bailout', an award-winning PBS documentary about the aftermath of the savings and loans debacle.

Hembree was a contributing editor at Parenting magazine and helped launch ParentTIME, the magazine's Web site. She also worked as a book editor on Global Dumping Ground (Seven Locks Press, 1987), The Self-Care Advisor (Time Inc. Health, 1996), and The Fight in the Fields: Cesar Chavez and the Farm Workers Movement (Harcourt Brace, 1997). A longtime member of the Association of Healthcare Journalists, she has lectured on journalism at UC Berkeley, UC Santa Cruz, Laney College, San Francisco State, and other institutions. She has received more than two dozen national journalism awards, including the Investigative Reporters and Editors Award for television reporting, the National Education Writers Award, a Jesse Neal Award for magazine editing, the National Press Foundation's Spanish Language Fellowship, and a team award for World Wide Web health reporting. Most recently, she has served as a mentor editor for the California Endowment for Health Journalism.

Elaine Herscher, Managing Editor

Elaine Herscher is a veteran journalist, having worked as a daily reporter for the past two decades. She was a reporter and a night city editor at the San Francisco Chronicle for 14 years, covering health policy, the gay community, and other issues. As the Chronicle's health policy reporter at the height of the AIDS crisis, she broke numerous stories and was one of the first in the nation to bring to light the issue of health-care workers contracting HIV on the job. Her work on the Chronicle's AIDS reporting team resulted in a Pulitzer Prize nomination in 1988. In 2001, for a series on work safety, she shared an award for Best Online Feature from the northern California chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists for CHI's series on job risks.

Elaine also has worked as a staff writer for the Contra Costa Times, and has written for the San Francisco Bay Guardian, Mother Jones, the Center for Investigative Reporting, and WebMD. She graduated with honors in English literature and writing from Pennsylvania State University and is a member of Investigative Reporters and Editors. Along with CHI contributing editor Chris Woolston, she is the co-author of Generation Extra Large: Rescuing Our Children from the Epidemic of Obesity (Perseus, 2004).

Psyche Pascual, M.A., Executive Editor

Psyche Pascual is a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter with two decades of experience in journalism, including six years as a reporter at the Los Angeles Times. As one of the metro writers assigned to cover the Los Angeles riots in 1992, she reported on the scene and shared in the Pulitzer Prize for spot news reporting. Most recently, reviews of health books that she edited for CHI received the award for outstanding commentary from the northern California chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists.

Her health stories have appeared in the Times, California Medicine, Consumer Health Interactive, and WebMD. She has also worked as a business writer and columnist for the Contra Costa Times, The Business Press, and the Daily Journal in Caracas, Venezuela. She also served as the managing editor of Inman News Features, an online real estate news syndicate. A longtime member of the Association of HealthCare Journalists and Investigative Reporters and Editors, Pascual has an M.A. in international journalism from the University of Southern California.

Deepi Brar, M.A., Multimedia Editor

Deepi Brar has a strong background in both scientific research and journalism. She worked as a research associate in a gene therapy lab for three years at the City of Hope National Medical Center in Los Angeles, and has co-published several scientific papers in peer-reviewed journals such as Cancer Gene Therapy. As a journalist, she has also worked as a production assistant for the daily radio program "Marketplace," and as an associate producer at Snap.com. She is also a member of the Association of Healthcare Journalists and Investigative Reporters and Editors. She earned a B.S. in biology and literature from the California Institute of Technology and a Master's degree in journalism from the University of California at Berkeley.

James Burke, M.B.A., Senior Editor

James Burke served for more than a decade as the managing editor of the Peace Education Foundation, one of the nation's leading producers of conflict resolution curricula for grades K-12. James also served as the Foundation's developmental editor, working with authors to take their ideas from concept to finished product. Prior to that, he was the assistant editor for Miami's Community Newspapers, where he edited the chain's 12 twice-weekly papers while covering the local political and business beat. James holds a B.A. in journalism from the University of Florida and an M.B.A. from Florida International University.

Tim Fitzgerald, Wire Services Editor

Tim Fitzgeraldselects and edits stories from the news and magazine feeds that are posted daily on CHI sites. The articles he has written for CHI include a feature on the job risks of professional athletes and the hazards of "economy-class syndrome." He studied Communications at Saint Louis University in St. Louis, Missouri.

Nancy Montgomery, Senior Editor

Montgomery has wide-ranging experience in the health-care and broadcast fields, including five years in the managed care department at McKesson and a one-year stint at PlanetRx.com. Prior to that, she and a colleague syndicated a column for over 50 radio stations in the U.S. and Canada for six years. She is a member of Investigative Reporters and Editors and shared a team award for Best Online Feature from the northern California chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists.

Jen Robb, Senior Editor

Jen Robb comes to Consumer Health Interactive from Time Inc. Health, where she worked as a fact checker and researcher at Health and Hippocrates magazines. She has also worked as a researcher at Wired and Mother Jones. She holds a B.A. in English from Boston University. She recently shared a team award for Best Online Feature from the northern California chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists

Meet Our Other Health and Medical Writers

Lisa Asta, M.D., Health and Medical Writer

Dr. Asta is a writer and pediatrician who practices in the San Francisco Bay Area. She is a clinical assistant professor of pediatrics at the University of California at San Francisco, and leads parenting groups at John Muir Medical Center in Walnut Creek. Her articles have appeared in the Journal of the American Medical Association, Hippocrates, and the Annals of Internal Medicine. She is a contributing editor at the New Physician magazine, and her health and medical articles for parents have appeared in Bay Area Parent, Valley Parent, Parents' Express, and MetroKids. Dr. Asta is board-certified by the American Board of Pediatrics and is a fellow at the American Academy of Pediatrics. She graduated from Temple University School of Medicine and Johns Hopkins University. She has written numerous stories for CHI's children's health section.

Paige Bierma, M.A., Health and Medical Writer

Bierma is an award-winning health journalist who works in San Francisco. Her expose on the abuses in wilderness therapy camps for troubled teens won the Investigative Reporters and Editors top award for outstanding magazine journalism. She has written for Hippocrates, Consumer Health Interactive, HealthLeaders, and Safety + Health, among other publications, and has won a Casey citation for her reporting on childen's and teen health issues. She also works for Current TV and her videos have been screened in various film festivals. She has a BA in journalism from the University of Iowa and a M.A. in Latin American Studies from Stanford University.

Kevin Boyd, Health and Medical Writer

A freelance health reporter when he wrote for Consumer Health Interactive, Boyd is now in the communications department at UCSF Medical School in San Francisco, California.

Melanie Haiken, M.A., Health and Medical Writer

A veteran health writer and editor based in the San Francisco Bay Area, Haiken was formerly the health editor of Parenting magazine and has served as executive editor of BabyCenter.com and the Industry Standard and as managing editor of San Francisco magazine. She writes regularly on family issues and women's and children's health for Parenting, Health, and a number of other publications. She is also a regular contributor to BabyCenter.com, ParentCenter.com, and Consumer Health Interactive. She lives in San Rafael,California, with her two daughters.

Sarah Henry, Health and Medical Writer

Sarah is a freelance writer who specializes in health and parenting issues. She worked for almost a decade at the Center for Investigative Reporting in San Francisco where her health and science-related articles appeared in publications such as The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times Magazine, Columbia Journalism Review, Parenting, and other newspapers and magazines. While at CIR she also worked as an associate producer on several TV programs on health topics, including the first installment of the PBS series "The Health Quarterly" and a story for CBS' 60 Minutes.

Prior to being a freelancer, Henry was a staff writer for Hippocrates and Health magazines. In recent years her health reporting has appeared in publications such as Hippocrates, BabyCenter.com, ParentCenter.com, San Francisco, and other media outlets. She has covered a wide-range of health topics including infertility, assisted suicide, health insurance, repetitive strain injuries, lead poisoning, diabetes, asthma, and physician stress.

Barbara Jamison, M.F.A., Story Editor

A freelance writer, editor, and translator in San Francisco, Jamison has edited and translated for Harcourt-Brace, Oxford University Press, and other publishers, and has written for WebMD, Hippocrates, the San Francisco Chronicle, and Latin American Review, among others. She won two PEN awards for stories in the 1980s, and published a book of short stories with Futharc Press in 1996. She also contributes health stories and book reviews to CHI.

Peter Jaret, Health and Medical Writer

Peter is a freelance and medical writer who has published widely on the subjects of business, health, and the environment. He is a frequent contributor to National Wildlife magazine, Health, and other publications. His work has appeared in National Geographic, Newsweek, Men's Journal, Remedy, Harper's Bazaar, and other national magazines. Jaret is the recipient of the 1992 American Medical Association award for medical reporting and the 1998 James Beard Award for journalism. He is the author of In Self-Defense (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich), Active Living Every Day, and the forthcoming Heart Healthy for Life.

Kristin Kloberdanz, M.A., Health and Medical Writer

Also from Time Inc. Health, where she worked as a researcher. She currently works at the literary magazine Book in New York City, where she edits and writes reviews and news features. In addition, she's been a contributing writer for the Chicago Tribune, San Francisco magazine, the San Francisco Examiner magazine, and other publications. She has an M.A. in journalism from Northwestern University.

Paula Kriner, M.S., Health and Medical Writer

Kriner has a master's degree in public health and has written for Medical Economics and California Lawyer, among other places. As a consultant for California's Department of Health Services and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, she has also written and developed training materials about breast cancer screening, diagnosis, and follow-up for clinicians.

Kate Lee, M.A., Health and Medical Editor

Lee is a former associate editor at Consumer Health Interactive and a former researcher at Time Inc. Health. She is currently a senior editor for health at BabyCenter.

Stephen Levine, Research/Associate Editor

Levine has 10 years' experience in research and investigative reporting. He is a former staff reporter for the Center for Investigative Reporting, an independent news agency based in San Francisco that works with CBS's "60 Minutes," "Frontline," and other outlets. In addition, he served as an associate producer on the Emmy-award-winning Frontline documentary "Hot Guns: Crime, Cheap Guns, and Public Neglect" and as research editor on several other PBS documentaries.

Levine has a strong background in print reporting and teaching as well. He is the co-author of the book Paper Trails: A Guide to Public Records in California, often used in college journalism classes. He has freelanced for Hippocrates, Parenting, and the San Francisco Examiner, and has worked at the San Francisco Business Times, California Lawyer, and as a stringer for the Washington Post. He has taught investigative reporting at UC Santa Cruz and Media Alliance. Among other awards, he has received the National Press Foundation Spanish Language Fellowship, the Investigative Editors and Reporters Award (book category), the Society of Professional Journalists Excellence in Journalism award, and the National Press Club's First Place Award for Consumer Journalism. Levine earned a B.A. in sociology from the University of California at Berkeley.

Toni Martin, M.D., Health and Medical Writer

Dr. Toni Martin is a board-certified internist and geriatrician who has practiced in Oakland, California, for 19 years. She has served as Chief of Patient Education at Kaiser Oakland and on the Berkeley Community Health Commission, and is a member of the clinical faculty at the University of California at San Francisco Medical School. She is also the author of How to Survive Medical School (Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1983), and served as a contributing writer at Hippocrates magazine. Dr. Martin lives in Berkeley with her husband and three children. She has written for CHI's children's health and book review sections and serves on CHI's medical review board.

Colman McCarthy, Health and Medical Writer

McCarthy was a longtime reviewer for the Washington Post as well as a syndicated columnist with the Washington Post Writers Group. He currently writes freelance articles, including book reviews, for the Washington Post, the Baltimore Sun, Salon.com, the National Catholic Reporter, and other publications. He teaches peace studies at high schools and seven universities in the District of Columbia, and lectures at colleges throughout the country. At CHI, he has contributed reviews about books on aging and caregiving issues, for which he won an award for best online commentary from the northern California chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists.

Teresa Moore, M.A., Health and Medical Writer

Moore is a media studies instructor at the University of San Francisco. A former reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle for eight years, she specialized in juvenile health and welfare and disability rights. Her reporting on San Francisco's foster care system was honored by the Youth Law Center. Moore has written for the Family Therapy Networker, Ms. magazine, the Washington Post, New York Newsday, Parenting, and Microsoft Network. Moore received a bachelor of arts degree from Princeton University and a master's degree in journalism from the University of California at Berkeley. She is a two-time recipient of an Annie E. Casey Foundation fellowship.

Beatrice Motamedi, Health and Medical Writer

Motamedi is a former San Francisco Chronicle reporter and a former contract editor at Time Inc. Health. She has written for Consumer Health Interactive, BabyCenter, PlanetRx, and many other online health portals.

Kerry Nelson, M.L.S., Health and Medical Writer

A former associate of the Center for Investigative Reporting, Nelson is a freelance writer and library sciences specialist living in Berkeley. She has worked on health manuscripts for the Hesperian foundation, which published Where There Is No Doctor, and has served as a consultant to the staff of the Library of Parliament of Namibia.

Carol Ness, Health and Medical Writer

Ness has been a San Francisco Bay Area writer for 11 years, first at the San Francisco Examiner and currently at the San Francisco Chronicle. As an editor at the Examiner, Ness headed up coverage of health, environmental and legal issues, as well as state and national politics. She ran the paper's coverage of the 1988 presidential campaign, and worked on the city, national/foreign and copy desks. Ness was project editor of the Examiner's 16-part series on gay and lesbian culture, "Gay in America," published in 1989 and winner of the Penney-Missouri Paul Myhre Award for Excellence. As a reporter, she chiefly covered social issues, especially those pertaining to women, the gay community, age, race, affirmative action, and demographic change. Ness earned her bachelor of arts degree at Middlebury College in Vermont. She won a Michigan Journalism Fellowship to study at the University of Michigan in 1985-86 and an Annenberg Fellowship for the study of immigration issues at the University of Southern California in 2001.

Tonse N.K. Raju, M.D., Health and Medical Writer

Dr. Tonse N.K. Raju is a board-certified neonatologist and professor of Pediatrics and Obstetrics and Gynecology at the University of Illinois; he is also clinical director of the Neonatal ICU. A serious amateur medical historian and past president of the Society for Medical History of Chicago, he holds memberships in many medical history organizations, including the prestigious American Association for the History of Medicine. Dr. Raju writes regularly for professional journals, including a popular biography series, "The Nobel Chronicles," for The Lancet, and a monthly column entitled "Great Moments in Medicine" for Hippocrates magazine. He has also written fiction in Kannada, a South Indian language; one of his short stories (Unreachable Heights, 1977) was included in a 1999 anthology of 100 best short stories of the century.

Diana Reiss-Koncar, Health and Medical Writer

An associate of the Center for Investigative Reporting, Reiss-Koncar has written for Hippocrates, Time-Inc. Health, and Salon.com, produced radio broadcasts for the Smithsonian Institute, and edited books for W.W. Norton and Chronicle Books. In 1999, Reiss-Koncar was awarded the Swedish Embassy's Bicentennial Award for journalism. She also has a background in health care and is working as a medic at the Berkeley Free Clinic.

Maggie Roth, Health and Medical Writer

Roth is a former associate of the Center for Investigative Reporting and a former assistant director of Providence House, which provides shelter to people suffering from AIDS and recovering from substance abuse.

Jim Scott, Health and Medical Editor

Scott is the former editor of Consumer Health Interactive and a former senior editor at Health magazine. He is currently editor-in-chief of BabyCenter.com.

Anne E. Stein, Health and Medical Writer

Stein has served as a fitness columnist for MSNBC and a former managing editor for Inside Triathlon magazine. A cyclist herself, she has written for Sports Illustrated for Women, Bicycling Magazine, and the Chicago Tribune. She has contributed many articles to CHI's fitness section.

Betty Szudy, Health and Medical Writer

Szudy is a health and safety educator who has worked with the Labor Occupational Health Program (LOHP) at the University of California at Berkeley since 1988. She directs LOHP's Hazardous Waste Worker Training Project and is also the Training Coordinator for the Asia Health and Safety Project, for which she has conducted factory worker safety trainings in Indonesia and the People's Republic of China. Her areas of expertise include curriculum development, designing participatory training courses ranging from two to forty hours, and developing national and international training projects for trade unionists, joint labor-management groups, and community activists.

Ms. Szudy co-authored the nationally recognized publication The Right to Understand: Linking Literacy to Health and Safety Training, a manual that provides tools and practical tips for developing materials and training programs that work for audiences with a range of reading and writing skills. She has also published numerous articles on the impact of health and safety training on improving safety at the workplace. She has a bachelor's degree in Social Work from the California State University at Chico.

David Tuller, M.P.H.,Health and Medical Writer

Tuller, a former staff writer for the San Francisco Chronicle, is the former health editor of Salon.com. He has also written for The New York Times and the Washington Post, and is the author of Cracks in the Iron Closet (Faber &Faber 1996).

Laurie Udesky, Contributing Editor

Udesky is an award-winning journalist and editor who has reported on health and medical issues for both print and radio for more than 15 years. She has filed stories for National Public Radio, and produced stories for "Crossroads" a weekly program that was aired nationally on public radio, the Pacifica program "AIDS in Focus," and NPR affiliate KQED, and has served as a reporter or editor for medical trade journals such as TB Monitor, AIDS Alert, Clinical Laser Monthly, Subacute Care Monthly, and Women's Healthcare Management. She wrote a chapter on drug interactions for The Self-Care Advisor, a Time Inc. Health publication, and has written regularly on senior, children's, and women's health for Consumer Health Interactive since 1999. She has also served as associate editor of Southern Exposure magazine.

Udesky has also written for Children's Advocate, the San Francisco Examiner, the Baltimore Sun, the Dallas Morning News, the St. Petersburg Times, the Turkish Daily News, and Salon.com. She has received a number of national awards, including the 1995 Exceptional Merit Media Award (EMMA) for her expose of health and safety hazards facing garment workers sewing for large U.S. corporations here and abroad. Her Southern Exposure series on the shortcomings of federal antipoverty programs also won the prestigious gold awards in magazine writing from both the Sidney Hillman Foundation and Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE). She graduated with honors in English literature from the UC Santa Cruz.

Benj Vardigan, Health and Medical Writer

Former Managing Editor of Consumer Health Interactive, he previously worked as an editor for Miller Freeman, Inc., a San Francisco-based publishing company. He is an award-winning poet and holds a B.A. in English from the University of Michigan. In 2001, for his CHI series on the hazards of sports supplements containing ephedra, he was named Outstanding Young Journalist of the Year in the online category by the northern California chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists.

Caroline Wellbery, M.D., Health and Medical Writer

Caroline is an Assistant Professor at Georgetown University. She received her M.D. from the University of California at San Francisco in 1991 and completed her residency in Family Practice in Santa Rosa, California in 1994. After finishing a one-year fellowship in medical editing at Georgetown University, she joined the Department of Family Medicine Faculty, where she currently teaches medical students and residents. She is assistant deputy editor of American Family Physician, the professional journal for the American Academy of Family Physicians, and sees patients at Unity Health Care in Washington, DC.

Todd Woody, M.A., Health and Medical Writer

Todd is a former senior editor and senior writer at The Industry Standard, where he led the newsmagazine's health care coverage. He previously served as an associate editor and senior writer at The Recorder, a San Francisco legal daily newspaper, where he covered environmental issues. He has also worked as a reporter at metropolitan newspapers in South Florida, and his work has appeared in The New York Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, the San Jose Mercury News, Wired magazine, Outside magazine, Columbia Journalism Review, and other publications. He holds a master's degree in journalism from Columbia University and a bachelor's degree from the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Chris Woolston, M.S., Health and Medical Writer and Contributing Editor at Consumer Health Interactive

Prior to joining CHI, he was at Time Inc. Health, where he worked as a staff writer for Hippocrates magazine. He has written for Time Inc. Health, Hippocrates, Consumer Health Interactive, and WebMD, and is a member of the National Association of Science Writers and the Association of Health Care Journalists. In 2001, Woolston shared a team award for his reporting on worker safety from the northern California chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists.

He has a bachelor's degree in biology (fish and wildlife management program) and a master's in biology from Montana State University in Bozeman. (He studied nitrogen cycles in Antarctic lakes and was bitten by a penguin while completing his master's). He has a graduate certificate in science writing and communication from UC Santa Cruz. With CHI managing editor Elaine Herscher, he is the co-author of Generation Extra Large: Rescuing Our Children from the Obesity Epidemic (Perseus, 2004).

First published November 19, 2003
Copyright © 2003 Consumer Health Interactive

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