Rebecca Hersher
Rebecca Hersher 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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To find out if music really is a universal language, researchers gave people 14 second samples of songs from around the world and asked them to say what kind of song it is. -
Federal officials at the U.N. climate meeting are ignoring climate science and touting coal and fossil fuels. But local and state authorities pledge to reduce greenhouse gas emissions on their own. -
The U.S. hosted an event on coal and refused to endorse the findings of a dire climate science report. And yet, in official negotiations, the U.S. is working out how to implement the Paris agreement. -
The U.N. climate meeting underway in Poland is the most important climate conference since the 2015 Paris Agreement set emissions reduction goals for nearly every country on Earth. -
According to the government's most comprehensive assessment to date, climate change has already damaged American infrastructure and cost both money and lives. -
A chemical in common paint removal products is implicated in more than 50 deaths. Even though a federal ban has been delayed, some major retailers are voluntarily taking the products off shelves. -
The city itself — skyscrapers, homes and factories — snagged the moist air of Hurricane Harvey and caused more rain to fall. Two new studies detail how humans are making hurricane flooding worse. -
People in Puerto Rico don't trust the water supply, and with good reason. Local systems aren't adequately tested for contaminants, including lead. -
Hurricane Florence — large, slow and full of moisture — is threatening to inundate the Southeast. It's a type of storm that's getting more likely to form. -
Hurricane Harvey was a wake-up call for petrochemical plants along the Gulf Coast to rethink plans for major floods. Some companies are starting to prepare for storms that are larger and more severe.
