Michaeleen Doucleff
Michaeleen Doucleff, PhD, is a correspondent for NPR's Science Desk. For nearly a decade, she has been reporting for the radio and the web for NPR's global health outlet, Goats and Soda. Doucleff focuses on disease outbreaks, cross-cultural parenting, and women and children's 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 2019, Doucleff and Senior Producer Jane Greenhalgh produced a story about how Inuit parents teach children to control their anger. That story was the most popular one on NPR.org for the year; altogether readers have spent more than 16 years worth of time reading it.
In 2021, Doucleff published a book, called Hunt, Gather, Parent, stemming from her reporting at NPR. That book became a New York Times bestseller.
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 bachelor degree in biology from Caltech, a doctorate in physical 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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On an eight-hour Emirates flight, with mask-wearing enforced, a whopping 27 coronavirus-positive people boarded the plane in Dubai. Guess how many passengers got infected? -
There's evidence that certain vaccines boost the body's defense against many kinds of illness. Scientists are investigating whether this benefit extends to protection from COVID-19. -
As scientists race to develop a vaccine specific for COVID-19, some researchers are testing an old vaccine, that's been proven safe and is cheap to manufacture, to see if it could slow the pandemic.
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As if the pandemic weren't enough, people are wondering whether climate change will cause pathogens buried in frozen ground to come back to life as the Arctic warms. How worried should we be?
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So far, there have been only a few cases of illness tied to a new kind of coronavirus. But the urgency to learn more about the virus was heightened recently when the first instances of person-to-person infection were seen. -
A new virus that causes severe pneumonia and sometimes kidney failure has infected more people. Since the virus first appeared in March 2012, it has infected 24 people, including 17 deaths. -
Until now, a new SARS-like virus showed little signs of being contagious. Only 10 cases have been reported, and all appeared to originate in the Middle East. Health officials now say a British resident likely caught the virus from a family member in the U.K., indicating that the virus can spread between people. -
A new virus, which causes severe pneumonia, has killed a British man with a suppressed immune system. This is the sixth death from the coronavirus and the first outside the Middle East, where it emerged last year. Officials say the risk to the general population is low. -
Scientists offer a glimmer of hope that a treatment for humans with the deadly disease might be on the horizon. Two drugs commonly used to treat other viral infections reduced the symptoms of the Middle East respiratory syndrome in a small number of monkeys. -
Here are recommendations from researchers on how to stave off infectious diseases such as the common cold and the flu during a flight.
