Helen Branswell is a senior writer at STAT, an online news publication based in Boston, USA, that focuses on health, medicine, and scientific discovery. She covers infectious diseases and global health. Branswell came to STAT from The Canadian Press, where she was the national news agency’s medical reporter from 2000 to 2015 and covered the 2003 SARS outbreak. Branswell was a 2011 Nieman Global Health Fellow at Harvard, where her work focused on polio eradication. She was a 2004 CDC Knight Fellow, spending three months embedded at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.