As a Senior Future Tense Fellow at New America, Dr. Sheri Fink examines medical care in large scale emergencies including natural disasters and pandemics. As a 2013 Bernard L. Schwartz Fellow, Fink wrote the New York Times best-selling book Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital, which the New York Times named one of the ten best books of 2013 and which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction, the 2014 J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the Ridenhour Book Prize, and the SIBA 2014 Book Award for Nonfiction.
Fink’s reporting has won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Magazine Award, and the Overseas Press Club Lowell Thomas Award, among other journalism prizes. Her coverage of the 2012 hurricane season and its effects on the health care systems of New York City and New Orleans won the beat reporting award from the Association of Health Care Journalists in 2013. Her story “The Deadly Choices at Memorial,” co-published with the New York Times Magazine, chronicled decisions made by the medical staff of one New Orleans hospital in the desperate days after Hurricane Katrina.
Fink is currently a staff reporter for the New York Times. A former relief worker in disaster and conflict zones, she received her M.D. and Ph.D. from Stanford University. Her first book, War Hospital: A True Story of Surgery and Survival, is about medical professionals under siege during the genocide in Srebrenica, Bosnia-Herzegovina.
