Rebecca Hersher
Rebecca Hersher (she/her) is a reporter on NPR's Science Desk, where she reports on outbreaks, natural disasters, and environmental and health research. Since coming to NPR in 2011, she has covered the Ebola outbreak in West Africa, embedded with the Afghan army after the American combat mission ended, and reported on floods and hurricanes in the U.S. She's also reported on research about puppies. Before her work on the Science Desk, she was a producer for NPR's Weekend All Things Considered in Los Angeles.
Hersher was part of the NPR team that won a Peabody award for coverage of the Ebola epidemic in West Africa, and produced a story from Liberia that won an Edward R. Murrow award for use of sound. She was a finalist for the 2017 Daniel Schorr prize; a 2017 Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting fellow, reporting on sanitation in Haiti; and a 2015 NPR Above the Fray fellow, investigating the causes of the suicide epidemic in Greenland.
Prior to working at NPR, Hersher reported on biomedical research and pharmaceutical news for Nature Medicine.
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Strong winds can make it feel a lot colder than the thermometer suggests. Protect yourself by covering exposed skin and sheltering inside. -
Tens of millions of people are in the path of a major winter storm. Federal cuts threaten efforts to understand the causes of such weather. -
Thousands of employees whose contracts end this year will lose their jobs, FEMA managers said at personnel meetings this week. The cuts could hobble the nation's disaster agency. -
Some of the country's highest home insurance prices are in the central U.S., a region generally considered to be protected from climate-driven disasters such as wildfires and hurricanes. -
Funding for FEMA's disaster survivor hotline lapsed the day after the Texas floods, federal records show. It took DHS Secretary Kristi Noem five days to approve more money. -
The governor and top emergency official in Texas are both members of a council advising the Trump administration on options for eliminating the Federal Emergency Management Agency. -
New York, North Carolina, New Mexico and Texas have all suffered serious flooding this month. Climate change is causing even more rain to fall during the heaviest storms. -
The Federal Emergency Management Agency has a long history of failing to help those who need assistance the most after disasters. Biden-era changes meant to fix some of those problems now face an uncertain future. -
A performance of the masterpiece will be transmitted into space on Saturday. The waltz has been associated with space travel since its inclusion in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey. -
It's getting more common for a lot of tornadoes to form over a big area in a short period of time. But the total number of tornadoes each year in the U.S. is stable.
