Jon Hamilton
Jon Hamilton is a correspondent for NPR's Science Desk. Currently he focuses on neuroscience and health risks.
In 2014, Hamilton went to Liberia as part of the NPR team that covered Ebola. The team received a Peabody Award for its coverage.
Following the 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Japan, Hamilton was part of NPR's team of science reporters and editors who went to Japan to cover the crisis at the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant.
Hamilton contributed several pieces to the Science Desk series "The Human Edge," which looked at what makes people the most versatile and powerful species on Earth. His reporting explained how humans use stories, how the highly evolved human brain is made from primitive parts, and what autism reveals about humans' social brains.
In 2009, Hamilton received the Michael E. DeBakey Journalism Award for his piece on the neuroscience behind treating autism.
Before joining NPR in 1998, Hamilton was a media fellow with the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation studying health policy issues. He reported on states that have improved their Medicaid programs for the poor by enrolling beneficiaries in private HMOs.
From 1995-1997, Hamilton wrote on health and medical topics as a freelance writer, after having been a medical reporter for both The Commercial Appeal and Physician's Weekly.
Hamilton graduated with honors from Oberlin College in Ohio with a Bachelor of Arts in English. As a student, he was the editor of the Oberlin Review student newspaper. He earned his master's degree in journalism from Columbia University, where he graduated with honors. During his time at Columbia, Hamilton was awarded the Baker Prize for magazine writing and earned a Sherwood traveling fellowship.
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Art can make the brain's wiring stronger, more flexible and ready to learn, say the authors of a new book, Your Brain on Art: How the Arts Transform Us. -
The surf is always up in Waco, Texas, thanks to an artificial wave so good it's attracting top professionals and casual riders. It's a sign of just how far the technology of wave making has come.
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Doctors have a new option for suicidal patients. It's a fast-acting nasal spray containing a version of the anesthetic ketamine.
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Gene therapy has helped a 9-year-old boy regain enough muscle strength to run. If successful in others, the treatment could change the lives of thousands of children with Duchenne muscular dystrophy.
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Two new human studies back earlier hints that vaccines designed to prevent respiratory infections might also provide some protection against Alzheimer's disease.
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Structures inside healthy brain cells nimbly move from one state to the next to perform different functions. But in certain degenerative brain diseases, scientists now think, that process gets stuck.
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A coronavirus vaccine could become ineffective if the virus were to undergo certain genetic changes. But so far, so good: Scientists see no evidence that's happening.
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Researchers around the world are tracking the mutations in the coronavirus as it reproduces and spreads to ensure changes in the virus do not affect the development of the vaccine.
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After a decade of failure in treating Alzheimer's with drugs, the National Institutes of Health is funding a five-year effort in Seattle to learn more about how the disease starts in the brain.
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A neurologist who wanted to know how the brain changes in response to a physical disability put his arm in a pink cast for two weeks to find out.
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Tests for the immune response to the coronavirus are revealing thousands of people who were infected but never got severely ill. The findings suggest the virus is less deadly than it first appeared.
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Early reports found death rates as high as 90% among COVID-19 patients on ventilators. But some hospitals are now reporting mortality lower than 30%.
