Our Team

Rob Waters, Founding Editor, is an award-winning health and mental health journalist who has worked as a staff reporter or editor at Bloomberg News, Time Inc. Health and the Psychotherapy Networker. He was a contributing writer to Health Affairs and his articles have also appeared in the Washington Post, Kaiser Health News, STAT, the Atlantic.com, Mother Jones and many other outlets. He was a 2005 fellow with the Carter Center for Mental Health Journalism. His reporting has focused on mental health, public health and science. In 2021, his mental health reporting was honored by the Association of Health Care Journalists, the National Institute for Health Care Management, and the Society of Professional Journalists, Northern California. You can contact Waters here.

Diana Hembree, Co-Founding Editor, is an investigative journalist who work has been honored by a team Polk Award and an Investigative Reporters and Editors team award, a National Press Club award, a Jesse Neal Award for Magazine Editing, and more than a dozen others. She has served as a staff senior editor at Time Inc. Health and its physicians’ magazine, Hippocrates and as a staff reporter and news editor at the Center for Investigative Reporting for a decade, where she worked with CBS’s “60 Minutes” and PBS/Frontline, among other outlets. Hembree was also a longtime editor in chief of a health and medical content startup that reached more than 3 million unique visitors a month. She has written for Forbes, Columbia Journalism Review, Southern Exposure, California magazine and many other outlets, and has a BA in English literature from UC Santa Cruz and a Master’s degree in sustainable food systems from Green Mountain College. Bonus fact: In college she taught rats how to play soccer using operant conditioning. You can contact her here.

Josh McGhee, Chicago Bureau Chief and Criminal Justice Reporter, is an investigative reporter covering the intersection of criminal justice and mental health with an emphasis on public records and data reporting. He has covered Chicago on various beats for the last decade, including criminal justice, courts, policing, race, inequality, politics and community news. He’s previously reported at DNAinfo Chicago, WVON, the Chicago Reporter and Injustice Watch. His stories have been carried by US News and World Report, Miami Herald, the Kansas City Star, the Sacramento Bee, and many other papers. He attended Culver-Stockton College in Canton, Missouri. McGhee lives on the South Side of Chicago. Bonus fact: He has served as a coach for children in the All-American Basketball Academy. You can contact him here.

Tiffany Raether, Operations Manager, has a Master’s degree in Depth Psychology with a focus on Community, Liberation, Indigenous and Eco-Psychologies from Pacifica Graduate Institute. She has over ten years of experience in management, with a rich background in digital marketing, operations and project management in the corporate sector and various industries. Raether’s graduate research and media projects center around the intersection of post-colonial solutions to development, epistemic justice and advocating for indigenous communities. Prior to her graduate studies, Raether received her Bachelor’s degree in international business and financial services from San Francisco State University. You can contact her here.

Alma Campos, Lead Reporter, Immigrant Mental Health Reporting Project, is an award-winning bilingual journalist in Chicago and is passionate about telling stories of immigrants in the U.S. Born in Mexico, her path led her from Azusa, California, to Chicago’s South Side. Her work dives into the immigrant experience, capturing stories across a range of topics from mental health and labor to community resilience. She contributes to The Guardian, is a senior editor at South Side Weekly, and leads reporting on the intersection of immigration and mental health for the Chicago bureau of MindSite News. Her work has also appeared in WTTW, Crain’s Chicago Business and Univision. @alma_campos

Tina Rosenberg, Chair, Editorial Advisory Board, is the Co-Founder & VP for Innovation of the Solutions Journalism Network, a nonprofit learning, training and story distribution hub that works to spread the practice of solutions journalism: rigorous reporting on responses to social problems. Rosenberg is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author. A longtime New York Times writer, she was the co-author of the popular Fixes column in The New York Times “Opinionator” section that ran for 11 years.

Rosenberg books include “Children of Cain: Violence and the Violent in Latin America,” and “The Haunted Land: Facing Europe’s Ghosts After Communism,” which won the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award. She has received a MacArthur Fellowship and has written for dozens of magazines, including The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, Foreign Policy and The Atlantic. She is the author, most recently, of “Join the Club: How Peer Pressure Can Transform the World.” Rosenberg earned her bachelors and masters degrees from Northwestern University. You can contact her here.

Courtney Wise Randolph, Writer, is a native Detroiter and freelance writer. She is the host of COVID Diaries: Stories of Resilience, a 2020 project between WDET and Documenting Detroit which won an Edward R. Murrow Award for Excellence in Innovation. Her work has appeared in Detour Detroit, Planet Detroit, Outlier Media, the Detroit Free Press, Michigan Quarterly Review, and Black in the Middle: An Anthology of the Black Midwest, one of the St. Louis Post Dispatch’s Best Books of 2020. She specializes in multimedia journalism, arts and culture, and authentic community storytelling. Wise Randolph studied English and theatre arts at Howard University and has a BA in arts, sociology and Africana studies at Wayne State University. Wise writes articles and a daily newsletter for MindSite News, and both her parenting newsletter and her story on the damage to children’s mental health from corporal punishment won awards from the Digital Health Association in 2023. You can contact her here.

Samir Chadha, Newsletter Editor, is a writer and editor from London, in the UK. In the past, he’s been Assistant Editor at The White Review and Managing Editor at Port, and his writing has appeared in publications including Pitchfork and The European Review of Books.

Bonus fact: he loves a quiz.

TaSin Sabir, Designer, has a fine arts degree in photography from the California College of the Arts, for which she was awarded a portfolio scholarship. An Oakland native, Sabir’s artwork has been exhibited all around the Bay Area and the country. Sabir has published three photography books: Madagascar Made, Big Kids Can and 100 Families Oakland. She owns her own graphics art business and freelances regularly for a San Francisco newspaper based in the BayView district that is distributed to the incarcerated. Sabir graduated with a BFA in photography from the California College of the Arts. You can contact her here.

Akintunde Ahmad is a multimedia journalist focusing on the intersection of education, economic inequality, and the justice system. Ahmad, an East Oakland native who went to Oakland Technical High School, holds a BA in sociology from Yale University and an MS in journalism and documentary film from Columbia University. His articles have been featured in The Atlantic, The Appeal, Columbia Journalism Review, and The Guardian. He has been featured on broadcasts ranging from The Ellen Show to Sway in the Morning.

Ahmad has been an Ida B Wells Fellow with Type Investigations, a teacher for the Oakland Unified School District’s African American Male Achievement Program, and a fellow for the Columbia Journalism Review. He currently works as a journalist-in-residence at PolicyLink, a national research and action institute advancing racial and economic equity, and as a documentary film producer for Proximity Media. He is also the co-host of the podcast – Viewers Like Us and has started his own clothing line and co-managed coffee house on the side. You can contact him here.

Nell Bernstein is the author of Burning Down the House: The End of Juvenile Prison and All Alone in the World: Children of the Incarcerated, both published by The New Press. Burning Down the House won the Silver Gavel Award from the American Bar Association and was named one the Best Big Ideas of 2014 by The Daily Beast and a Best Book of the Year by Publishers Weekly. All Alone in the World was selected as a pick of the week by Newsweek, a best book of the year by the San Francisco Chronicle, and a top ten book of the year by the Online Review of Books. Both books have been adopted into the curricula of universities across the country.

Bernstein has lectured widely and written for publications including the New York Times, Washington Post, and The Marshall Project, and has made numerous radio and television appearances, including NRP’s Fresh Air and MSNBC. Prior to that, she was editor in chief of YO! (Youth Outlook), a magazine by and about young people. She was a Soros Justice Media Fellow in New York and has received a White House Champion of Change award for her advocacy on behalf of children of incarcerated parents. You can contact her here.

Neha Chaudhary, MD, is a writer and medical journalist who writes for The New York Times, The Washington Post, Forbes, Wired, CNN, ABC News and the ABC News Medical Unit, and other outlets. She is also a double board-certified child, adolescent, and adult psychiatrist on faculty at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School and co-founder of Brainstorm, Stanford’s Lab for Mental Health Innovation. Her research focuses on the intersection of technology and mental health, including using tech to promote early intervention and resilience in children. As she has said, she is a strong believer in the power of journalism and storytelling to make mental health mainstream. You can contact her here.

Sarah Corcoran serves as Guide Consulting Service’s vice president of government relations, bringing a decade of experience working with federal agencies such as DHS, HHS, and DOJ. She works with clients to craft legislative and regulatory strategies and leads all public affairs operations, grassroots outreach and social media strategy for clients. She manages GCS operations and staff, and provides legislative research and analysis, and regulatory/legislative drafting.

Corcoran co-authored and successfully managed several multimillion-dollar DOJ and HHS federal grants and also has worked as an independent political columnist and book editor. She received her bachelor of arts in political science, United States history and sociology from Arizona State University magna cum laude and attended law school at the University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law. You can contact her here.

Sarah Henry is a San Francisco Bay Area-based storyteller. The author of Hungry for Change and Farmsteads of the California Coast, she has covered food culture—including its impact on human and environmental health—for many years. She also writes about health care innovation, including in the mental health field. Her articles have appeared in The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times Magazine, San Francisco Chronicle, The Atlantic, and The Australian Magazine, among other outlets. She got her start in journalism at the Center for Investigative Reporting, where she focused on the social justice beat. You can contact her here.

Melissa Hung is a writer and journalist. Her essays and reported stories have appeared in Longreads, Catapult, NPR, Vogue, Pacific Standard, and Body Language (Catapult, 2022). She is the founding editor in chief of Hyphen and an alumna of the Tin House and VONA writing workshops. Melissa also directed San Francisco WritersCorps, an award-winning arts education program. She grew up in Texas, the eldest child of immigrants. You can contact her here.

Michele Cohen Marill graduated from Northwestern University with a BSJ in magazine journalism. She has served as a contributing editor of Atlanta magazine and as a freelance health and medical writer for several decades. A former national correspondent for the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, she has written for Health Affairs, STAT, and Nature Medicine and is a regular writer for Wired and Medscape. In Health Affairs, she recently reported on the conversion of Georgia’s infamous Central State Hospital in Milledgeville (once called the Georgia Lunatic Asylum) to community mental health centers with an emphasis on peer-based support. You can contact her here.

Laurie Udesky has been a reporter and editor for more than 25 years, reporting on mental health, social welfare, health equity and public policy issues. Her stories have been carried by outlets ranging from Kaiser Health News and the Los Angeles Times to the San Francisco Chronicle and the New York Times. She spent five years as a foreign correspondent in Turkey for outlets including the Dallas Morning News, salon.com and National Public Radio.

Udesky has won many national and regional journalism awards, including those in competitions held by Investigative Reporters & Editors, the Sidney Hillman Foundation, the Exceptional Merit Media Awards and the Northern California Society of Professional Journalists, the latter of which honored her for an investigative story on family courts called “Custody in Crisis” and a three-part audio series called “Out of the Shadows: Battling the Stigma of Depression.” Udesky has also been awarded three journalism fellowships, including a Robert Wood Johnson fellowship. You can contact her here.