STAT’s McFarlang wins Lo Award for her coverage

Usha McFarling

Usha Lee McFarling, national science correspondent at STAT, has been named the recipient of the 2024 Bernard Lo, MD Award in Bioethics.

This year’s award recognizes McFarling for her role in shaping the public discussion and policy debate about bioethics and equity in health care and research. It conveys a cash prize of $25,000.

With the announcement, McFarling becomes the first Lo Award recipient to be selected from outside academia. A longtime, Pulitzer-prize winning science and health reporter, McFarling brought her focus to inequities in health and medicine as they emerged from the COVID-19 pandemic.

Her continued reporting on these disparities has become essential to public understanding on a number of issues, including racial differences in pulse oximeter functioning, disproportionate early departures of Black residents from medical training programs, and the lack of diversity in orthopedics.

McFarling’s work revealing and amplifying unequal treatment and practices within health and medicine has substantially changed the way that these subjects are discussed and addressed.

Read more here.

Chris Roush

Chris Roush was the dean of the School of Communications at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Connecticut. He was previously Walter E. Hussman Sr. Distinguished Professor in business journalism at UNC-Chapel Hill. He is a former business journalist for Bloomberg News, Businessweek, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Tampa Tribune and the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. He is the author of the leading business reporting textbook "Show me the Money: Writing Business and Economics Stories for Mass Communication" and "Thinking Things Over," a biography of former Wall Street Journal editor Vermont Royster.