Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Geeta Anand joins faculty

Author, foreign correspondent and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Geeta Anand is joining the faculty of the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism.

Anand has been a journalist for 27 years, specializing in investigative reporting and narrative writing. A graduate of Dartmouth College, she began her career at newspapers in New England where she covered courts, crime and local government. She went on to cover politics at The Boston Globe and then joined The Wall Street Journal, where she developed a specialty in investigative work and health care. She was part of a team of reporters that won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize in explanatory journalism for a series on the impact of corporate scandals in America. She also turned one of her stories from the biotech beat into a 2006 book, The Cure: How a Father Raised $100 Million–And Bucked the Medical Establishment–In a Quest to Save His Children, which was made into the CBS movie “Extraordinary Measures,” starring Harrison Ford.

Anand has spent the past 10 years, most recently with The New York Times, as a foreign correspondent in India, where she was born. Her work on how hidden decision-makers make life-and-death choices about who gets health care in America was a Pulitzer finalist in 2004, and her series on drug prices and how lawmakers created legal monopolies that allowed prices to soar won a 2006 Gerald Loeb award, the most prestigious prize in business reporting. In 2007, the National Council for the Advancement of Science Writing awarded her the Victor Kohn Prize for Excellence in Medical Science Reporting. In 2013, her series on how tuberculosis became drug-resistant in India won first place in cross-border investigative reporting from the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists.

This past semester, she was the 2018 Nirupama Chatterjee Teaching Fellow at Berkeley Journalism, leading the India Reporting Project, which included guiding a student trip to India over spring break.

Anand will have the title of Acting Professor of Reporting, and will teach students with disparate levels of workplace experience in the School’s foundational reporting class. She will also offer strategic guidance for the overall reporting curriculum, serve as a master’s thesis adviser for second-year students and will take part in School governance as a member of the School’s senate faculty.

“Having a journalist of Geeta’s extraordinary accomplishments and broad life experiences join our faculty is a huge gain for us,” says Edward Wasserman, Berkeley Journalism dean. “After only one semester here, she feels like part of our academic family, and the students have responded enthusiastically to her teaching and professional influence.”

Anand says it’s been “tremendously fulfilling to work with young journalists who are so passionate about their work. I am looking forward not only to teaching but to collaborating with students on journalism that has local and global impact. I couldn’t be more excited to join the Berkeley Journalism faculty.”