about

Anna Maria is a journalist in the United States who specializes in public health and inequality.  

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Anna Maria is currently a global health reporter with ProPublica, a non-profit investigative journalism organization in the United States. She previously worked as a reporter at KFF Health News, the data-driven news site FiveThirtyEight, and as a producer at Univision and ABC News. For several years before that, she worked from more than 15 countries as a photojournalist and videographer for a variety of outlets. 

She has reported on several epidemics and disasters, including a mysterious form of chronic kidney disease afflicting agricultural workers, the aftermath of the 2011 Japanese earthquake and tsunami, gun deaths in the United States, multi-drug resistant tuberculosis in Peru, catastrophic flooding in Pakistan and, most recently, the public health response to COVID-19 in the U.S. 

A series produced with colleagues from KHN and the Associated Press on how chronic underfunding of the U.S. public health system exacerbated the impact of the COVID-19 epidemic was awarded a 2020 AAAS Kavli Science Journalism Gold Award and the 2021 Investigative Data Journalism prize from the Online News Association.  

In 2017, she was part of a team of journalists at FiveThirtyEight awarded the prestigious communications award from the National Academis of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine for the project Gun Deaths In America, which included Surviving Suicide in Wyoming. Her work on the Flint Water Crisis was a finalist for the Online Journalism Award for Investigative Data Journalism. 

With reporter Sasha Chavkin and the Center for Public Integrity, she produced a series on a deadly and mysterious epidemic of chronic kidney disease affecting agriculture communities in Latin America and Southeast Asia. It won numerous awards, including a Sigma Delta Chi from the Society of Professional Journalists, a Sidney Award from the Sidney Hillman Foundation, and a 2nd Place Kevin Carmody Award for Outstanding In-Depth Reporting from the Society of Environmental Journalists.  

Anna's reporting has been supported by the USC Center for Health Journalism, the International Reporting Project, and the John Jay Criminal Justice and Health Journalism Fellowship. She was a 2017 Knight Chair at University of Miami.  

She has a degree in Latin American studies and a Master of Public Health in epidemiology and global health.