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Shannon Brownlee, MS, is acting director of the New America Health Policy Program. A nationally known writer and essayist whose work has appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, New York Times Magazine, The New Republic, Slate, Time, Washington Monthly, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and the British medical journal BMJ among many other publications, she is best known for her groundbreaking work on avoidable health care, the patchy quality of medical evidence, and the implications for health care policy. Her book, Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine is Making Us Sicker and Poorer, was named the best economics book of 2007 by New York Times economics correspondent David Leonhardt. Brownlee’s current research and writing focus on issues surrounding delivery system reform, clinical evidence, and health care costs.
A former senior writer and editor at U.S. News & World Report, Brownlee lectures regularly at universities, medical schools, and in public venues, including the University of California, Los Angeles, Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, Duke University, the National Quality Forum, and Kaiser Permanente, among many others. Her work has been given numerous journalism awards, among them the Society of Professional Journalists Sigma Delta Chi Award, the 2010 American Society of Journalists and Authors June Roth Award for Medical Journalism, and the Victor Cohn Prize for Excellence in Medical Science Reporting. Overtreated was a semi-finalist for the National Book Award.
Brownlee holds a master’s degree in marine science from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and was named one of the 45 most influential graduates of the university in 2010, the 45th anniversary of the campus’ founding. In 2009 she was named one of four writers who changed the world by the World Federation of Science Journalists. She was a Knight Journalism Fellow at Stanford University, and is currently a member of the Association of Health Care Journalists, the American Society of Journalists and Authors, and the National Association of Science Writers. She serves as an instructor at the Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice and a Woodrow Wilson Visiting Scholar.
