Michaeleen Doucleff
Michaeleen Doucleff, PhD, is a correspondent for NPR's Science Desk. For nearly a decade, she has been reporting for the radio and the web for NPR's global health outlet, Goats and Soda. Doucleff focuses on disease outbreaks, cross-cultural parenting, and women and children's health.
In 2014, Doucleff was part of the team that earned a George Foster Peabody award for its coverage of the Ebola outbreak in West Africa. For the series, Doucleff reported on how the epidemic ravaged maternal health and how the virus spreads through the air. In 2019, Doucleff and Senior Producer Jane Greenhalgh produced a story about how Inuit parents teach children to control their anger. That story was the most popular one on NPR.org for the year; altogether readers have spent more than 16 years worth of time reading it.
In 2021, Doucleff published a book, called Hunt, Gather, Parent, stemming from her reporting at NPR. That book became a New York Times bestseller.
Before coming to NPR in 2012, Doucleff was an editor at the journal Cell, where she wrote about the science behind pop culture. Doucleff has a bachelor degree in biology from Caltech, a doctorate in physical chemistry from the University of Berkeley, California, and a master's degree in viticulture and enology from the University of California, Davis.
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The budget would eliminate $120 million a year from an ambitious U.S. program that aims to set up an early-warning system for infectious diseases.
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In an era when many kids get a first smartphone at age 10, psychologists say the devices have turned us into Pavlov's dogs — drooling for the next notification, buzz or text. Ready to dial back?
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Mosquitoes find some people way more delicious than others. Now scientists have found a way to make you less attractive, no chemicals needed.
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There's a new fear from climate change: bacteria and viruses buried in frozen ground coming back to life as the Arctic warms up. We went digging in permafrost to find out how worried we should be.
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Just what exactly is permafrost? And what is happening now that it's warming up? To find out, we enter the Arctic Circle's secret world of ice and frozen history.
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In the test, kids get a treat. If they don't eat it for, say, 10 minutes, they're promised a second treat. In a new interview, Serena Williams tells how she thinks she'd fare. What do most kids do?
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This year, the world came tantalizingly close to wiping out two human diseases: Guinea worm and polio. But right at the finish line, both eradication projects have run into surprising roadblocks.
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It's a new way to treat hydrocephalus. A study show it could save thousands of lives – in poor countries like Uganda and in rich countries, too.
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It took 20 years and $1.5 billion to develop a vaccine for dengue, a deadly mosquito-borne virus. After it finally got approval in many countries, a complication has surfaced.
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Who ruled early farming? Women! Studies of ancient bones show that women's physical labor was crucial to driving the agricultural revolution in Europe.
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For decades, scientists have noticed something particular about a mosquito-borne virus: The second infection can cause your blood vessels to leak, like with Ebola. Now scientists think they know why.
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For decades, scientists have predicted how climate change will hurt people's health. Now an international team of researchers say they're already seeing some of the damage.