MindSite News 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, MS, Diana Hembree, MindSite News Co-Founding Editor, is a journalist who has won more than two dozen national awards, including a first-place Investigative Reporters and Editors award, a Jesse Neal Award for Magazine Editing, a National Press Club Award for Consumer Reporting, a Folio Gold Award and a shared Polk Award. She served as a senior editor at Time Inc. Health and its physician’s magazine, Hippocrates, for four years, and as a reporter and news editor at the Center for Investigative Reporting for more than 10 years, where she worked with many national publications and with CBS’s “60 Minutes”and PBS/Frontline, where she served as associate producer of Frontline’s “The Great American Bailout.” 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 the Washington Post, Columbia Journalism Review, Southern Exposure, California magazine and many other outlets; has done book editing for Harcourt-Brace, Seven Locks Press and other publishers; and wrote a long-running column for Forbes online; she is also the a senior manager of narrative strategy at the Center for Care Innovations She has a BA in English literature from UC Santa Cruz with a concentration in biology and a Master’s degree in sustainable food systems from Green Mountain College. Bonus fact: While studying psychobiology at college, she taught rats how to play soccer using operant conditioning. You can contact her here.

Josh McGhee, Staff Reporter, Criminal Justice, 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 most recently 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 with his wife and son. 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.

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. Her 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.

Don Sapatkin, Writer, is an independent journalist who reports on science and health care. His primary focus for nearly two decades has been public health, especially policy, access to care, health disparities and behavioral health, notably opioid addiction and treatment. Sapatkin previously was a staff editor for Politico and a reporter and editor at the Philadelphia Inquirer. He earned a bachelor’s degree from Haverford College and is based in Philadelphia. You can contact him 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.

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.

Erin Eberle, Consultant, Strategy and Social Media, is a communications consultant with more than two decades of experience working with nonprofit organizations, foundations, and small businesses to craft digital strategies rooted in equity and justice. Eberle specializes in fundraising, digital communications, content strategy, and public relations, and has worked as director of engagement at the Better Food Foundation and as director of engagement and strategy at Farm Forward. They have a BS in psychology from Santa Clara University and studied at the Master’s degree level in Counseling Psychology at Lewis & Clark College. Bonus fact: She has served as a youth mentor in Green Corps Fresh Start for 10 years and as an Artist Mentor in the King School Museum of Contemporary Art for 5 years. You can contact Eberle 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. He 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. She 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.

Julianne Hill is an award-winning reporter based in Chicago whose stories have appeared on PBS, NPR’s This American Life, Morning Edition and The History Channel. She was a Rosalynn Carter Mental Health Journalism Fellow and earned a National Press Foundation Fellowship for reporting on HIV-AIDS. She worked as a team member earning the George Foster Peabody Award for the PBS science show, The New Explorers. Her investigation into New Hampshire’s policy of sending mental health patients who have committed no crimes to the state prison prompted the governor to change the state budget to build a new hospital and earned Hill her fourth Peter Lisagor Award from the Society of Professional Journalists’ Chicago chapter. In late 2022, she began working as a legal affairs writer for the ABA Journal, a trade publication for the legal profession. 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.

Diana Kapp, MBA, is a journalist whose work has taken her inside San Quentin prison and to war-torn Afghanistan. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, San Francisco Magazine, San Francisco Chronicle, MORE Magazine, O: the Oprah Magazine, and California Sunday Magazine, among other outlets. She is the author of two books, Girls Who Run the World, and Girls Who Green the World from Delacorte Press. She loves the Sawtooth Mountains, Neil Young, her 5 am running club, and climbing mountains. As Kapp reports, she is also a wannabe “rancher” (see www.idahorocky.com). You can contact her here.

Holly Korbey is an education and parenting journalist. She is the author of Building Better Citizens, and her work has appeared in The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Boston Globe, Yahoo News, and many other outlets. She has been a regular contributor on education for Edutopia as well as National Public Radio’s MindShift blog. She lives and works in Nashville, Tennessee, with her family. Find her on Twitter @HKorbey. 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.

Veronica Ortega, PhD, is a clinical, developmental and community psychologist turned journalist with a focus on mental health. She has been a practicing clinical psychologist, consultant and trainer, and a college professor. She is using her years of experience to develop stories that educate the public about the many issues related to mental health and wellness, or that explain the latest research findings. You can contact her here. 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. She 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.