Joe Neel
Joe Neel is NPR's deputy senior supervising editor and a correspondent on the Science Desk.
As a leader of NPR's award-winning health and science team, Neel directs coverage of breaking news in health and science, ranging from disease outbreaks and advances in medical research to debates over health reform and public health.
Joe also plays a key role in overseeing the Science Desk's award-winning enterprise reporting. Among his current projects and responsibilities, Neel supervises the Monday "Your Health" segment on Morning Edition. He also directs several ongoing editorial partnerships. One, a partnership with Kaiser Health News and public radio member stations, focuses on health care in the United States. Another is a polling project on health issues with the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
Neel has played a key role in expanding the network's coverage of global health and development issues. He is currently focused on domestic health issues, including cutting-edge biomedical research and developments in the health industry, such as the Affordable Care Act.
In 2008, he launched NPR's "Your Health" podcast and helped launch and grow "Shots," NPR's health blog, in 2010.
In addition to his responsibilities at NPR's Science Desk, Neel also regularly serves as newsroom manager, overseeing the network's overall news coverage.
During his tenure as editor, NPR's health reporters and correspondents have won numerous awards, including the George Foster Peabody Award, the National Academy of Sciences Communication Award, the Sigma Delta Chi Award from the Society for Professional Journalists, the Everett McKinley Dirksen Award for Distinguished Reporting on Congress, the American Association for the Advancement of Science's Journalism Prize, and the Association of Health Care Journalism award. Neel was awarded the prestigious Kaiser Family Foundation Media Fellowship in 2007.
Neel started filing stories about medicine and health as a freelancer for NPR in 1994 and joined the staff two years later.
He earned bachelor degrees from Washington University in St. Louis in both biology and German literature and language. He also studied biology at the Universitaet Tuebingen in Germany.
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The National Health Service is providing care for short-term travelers. So if you're on holiday and run out of an HIV drug, the NHS will help out, gratis. But if you're thinking of going for a long time to get free care, you're probably out of luck. -
The first reports of AIDS were from Los Angeles, New York and San Francisco among gay and bisexual men. Even now, you can see the lingering geographic contours of how the epidemic unfolded with AIDSVu, an interactive map developed by Emory University's school of public health. -
The leading international AIDS conference returns to the U.S. after a 22-year hiatus. A lot has happened in the years since the conference was last here. Treatments have turned a disease with a near-certain death sentence into a disease that people can live with for decades. And there is evidence that the epidemic could be greatly slowed or even stopped. -
A U.S. expert says there is no evidence that stem-cell therapy being offered in China will work in one of the most common causes of childhood blindness, optic nerve hypoplasia.
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The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention wants adults to remember that vaccines aren't just for kids. Whooping cough, shingles, tetanus, and several other illnesses are still big problems in the U.S., mostly because adults aren't getting the shots they need. -
A Catholic priest and the Indian Red Cross have created what some say is a model for AIDS care in the developing world: a combination hospital and community center.
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Research suggests several popular painkillers may increase the risk of heart attacks, strokes and other cardiovascular problems. NPR's Joe Neel answers questions about naproxen, Celebrex and other painkillers now under scrutiny.
