Sally Lehrman is Santa Clara University’s Knight Ridder-San Jose Mercury News Endowed Chair in Journalism and the Public Interest. She is also an independent journalist who specializes in covering race relations, identity and gender within the context of medicine and science.

Lehrman’s byline credits include Scientific American, Health, Salon.com, Nature, The Boston Globe and The DNA Files, which has produced three series of public radio documentaries on genetics distributed by National Public Radio. Her honors have included the 1995-96 John S. Knight Fellowship, a 2002 Peabody award, Peabody/Robert Wood Johnson Award for excellence in health and medical programming, and the duPont-Columbia University Silver Baton (for The DNA Files).

Lehrman is author of News in a New America, a fresh take on diversity in coverage and staffing, and served for a decade as national diversity chair for the Society of Professional Journalists. She is an Institute for Justice and Journalism Senior Fellow on race (http://www.justicejournalism.org/) and was a staff writer and editor for the Hearst-owned San Francisco Examiner.