Michaeleen Doucleff
Michaeleen Doucleff is a reporter for NPR's Science Desk. She reports for the radio and the Web for NPR's global health and development blog, Goats and Soda. Doucleff focuses on disease outbreaks, drug development, and trends in global health.
In 2014, Doucleff was part of the team that earned a George Foster Peabody award for its coverage of the Ebola outbreak in West Africa. For the series, Doucleff reported on how the epidemic ravaged maternal health and how the virus spreads through the air. In 2015, Doucleff and Senior Producer Jane Greenhalgh reported on the extreme prejudices faced by young women in Nepal when they're menstruating. Their story was the second most popular one on the NPR website in 2015 and contributed to the NPR series on 15-year-old girls around the world, which won two Gracie Awards.
As a science journalist, Doucleff has reported on a broad range of topics, from vaccination fears and the microbiome to beer biophysics and dog psychology.
Before coming to NPR in 2012, Doucleff was an editor at the journal Cell, where she wrote about the science behind pop culture. Doucleff has a doctorate in chemistry from the University of Berkeley, California, and a master's degree in viticulture and enology from the University of California, Davis.
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If you're traveling this spring, be sure you're vaccinated. 2017 is shaping up as a bad year for the measles, with thousands of cases in Italy and Romania. And vaccine coverage is stagnating.
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Farmers in a remote Ugandan tropical forest suffered from an excruciatingly painful foot ailment. Usually parasitic worms are the cause — but not this time. -
The Zika virus continues to impact a small number of pregnant women and their babies in the U.S., and there is no sign of it slowing down. "Zika is here to stay," the CDC's acting director says. -
Move over Japanese women. You've been dethroned as the population with the healthiest hearts. This group of people can fight off heart disease even into their 80s. What's their secret? -
Scientists predicted that more than 1,000 babies would be born with the birth defect in Brazil last year. That never happened. Why? -
It's aimed at rotavirus, a nasty pathogen that can cause diarrhea and kills more than 500 children a day. The secret to the vaccine is the same thing that makes space ice cream so cool. -
The world is seeing more and more new diseases, and the U.S. is no exception. We're living in a hot spot for tick-borne diseases. Some are deadly. The key to stopping them may be an unlikely critter. -
One scientist is predicting a risky year for tick-borne Lyme disease in the Northeast, and it's spreading. But don't panic. We've got tips. -
Lyme disease is spreading, and this summer is shaping up as a whopper. Why has the tick-borne illness gotten so bad? The answer traces back to something the colonists did more than 200 years ago. -
People were dropping dead in Malaysia, and no one could figure out why their brains were swelling. A young scientist solved the mystery. Then he had to get people to believe him.
