Public Health and Personal Freedom

media release: In her career as an award-winning health reporter, Cassandra Willyard has covered everything from the science behind Covid vaccination advice to the frontiers of cancer immunotherapy.

Based in Madison, Willyard has contributed to Nature, Scientific American, The New York Times, and many other national publications. In addition to her reporting, Willyard recently served as president of the National Association of Science Writers.

This fall, she’s set to visit the UW-Madison community to share insights from her career with students and to meet with health researchers as this semester’s Sharon Dunwoody Science Journalist in Residence.

Willyard’s visit to campus, from Oct. 21 to 23, will also include a public conversation with a pair of UW–Madison experts. Willyard will discuss the tension between public health and personal freedom with Michael Xenos, professor and chair of the Department of Life Sciences Communication, and Malia Jones, professor in the Department of Community and Environmental Sociology. The free public event is scheduled for 5:30 to 6:30 p.m. on Oct. 21 in 2520 Grainger Hall.

An alumna of UW–Madison, Willyard earned a master’s degree in science writing from Johns Hopkins University. As a freelance journalist, Willyard has written extensively about vaccines, emerging infectious diseases, diagnostics, global health, drug development and reproductive medicine.

She is particularly interested in how the therapies we choose to develop reflect deeper questions about what counts as “normal,” what counts as “better,” and who gets to decide. In 2023, for example, she wrote about the controversy around a new drug that helps children with dwarfism grow taller. Her stories frequently explore how scientists, policymakers, and the public navigate scientific uncertainty — and the complex decisions that arise when the answers aren’t clear.

The UW-Madison Science Journalist in Residence program was founded in 1986 and is hosted by the School of Journalism and Mass Communication and the Office of Strategic Communication. It is now part of the Sharon Dunwoody Journalist in Residence program at UW–Madison. The late Dunwoody, a professor of journalism at UW–Madison, co-founded the Science Journalist in Residence program with Terry Devitt, an emeritus director of research communications.

The program has hosted national science writers nearly every semester, in person and virtually, including climate reporter Alec Luhn, Grist and Interlochen Public Radio reporter Izzy Ross, PBS Eons host Kallie Moore, author and reporter Ben Goldfarb, and Radiolab host Latif Nasser.