Mississippi Today is thrilled to announce Laura Santhanam as its new health editor.

Santhanam is a Mississippi native who has spent the last 11 years of her career working as a health reporter and producer at PBS News. She is a former Knight-Wallace Fellow at the University of Michigan and was part of the team that won the Peabody Award in 2023 for “War in the Holy Land,” a special report documenting the Hamas attack on Israel and the aftermath. 

“I am thankful and thrilled for the opportunity to contribute to a newsroom that has done so much work to hold people in power accountable and to serve my home state,” Santhanam said. “This moment demands fearless journalism, and I cannot imagine a place more ready to deliver on that need than Mississippi Today.” 

Santhanam has covered health stories across four presidential administrations, including the overdose crisis, the COVID-19 pandemic and reproductive health care. As a fellow for the University of Southern California’s Annenberg Center for Health Journalism, she mentored journalists from across the country as they completed long-term investigations.

“We are so excited to gain the perspective of someone who not only has an impressive career in health journalism, but also an intimate knowledge of the state and its strengths and shortcomings,” said Kate Royals, managing editor of Mississippi Today. “Laura will undoubtedly strengthen our newsroom’s health coverage and be an amazing resource for the state as a whole.”

Mississippi Today’s award-winning health team was created in 2022 and is made up of three reporters and an editor. The team has covered stories including HIV prevention among minority groups, the state’s high rates of low-risk C-sections and state and local governments’ spending of opioid settlement funds.