Ithaca College

Steven Sternberg ’75, award-winning medical reporter for USA Today, will discuss “The Next Battleground: Public Health” at the semester’s final installment of The Ithacan’s “First Tuesdays” discussion series. The talk will take place this Tuesday, April 5, from 12:10 to 1:05 pm in Park Hall, room 220. The talk is free and open to the public.

Sternberg covers public health, heart disease, AIDS, bioterrorism, the human genome project, and many other medical issues for USA Today's Life section. He has reported on global public health from Europe, Africa and Asia.

He holds a bachelor’s degree in English from Ithaca College and a master’s in science writing from Johns Hopkins.

Sternberg started at USA Today in 1998. Prior to that, he worked as a freelance journalist and wrote articles for a number of publications including The Washington Post, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Mother Jones, Medical Economics, Science, The Scientist, and Science News.

From 1985 to 1994, he worked at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution as a founding member of the newspaper's science/medicine team. He was the first reporter to cover the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention full-time. He was also the first reporter permitted to observe the training of Epidemic Intelligence Service officers, the nation's first line of defense against emerging infectious diseases and bioterrorism attacks. He spent his last year at the newspaper as a Washington correspondent covering the Clinton health reform campaign.

From 1981 to 1985, he was the lead medical reporter for the Miami Herald, covering the emergence of the nation's third largest AIDS outbreak, health policy, emergency/trauma care, and many other issues.

Sternberg has won numerous national, state and local awards for his work including The National Headliner for consistently outstanding feature writing, the Penney-Missouri award for the best health story of 1989, and the Society for Professional Journalist's Green Eyeshade award. He was awarded a prestigious John S. Knight Professional Journalism Fellowship at Stanford University, 1991-92, where he spent a term working in a genetics laboratory. In 1994, he was awarded a coveted Kaiser Family Foundation media fellowship in 1994, which enabled him to spend the next year investigating an unusual epidemic that swept through the Navajo reservation of Arizona in 1993. His reporting led to a series in USA Today. He has also served as faculty for Kaiser media training sessions in the U.S. and Africa.