Ailsa Chang
Ailsa Chang is an award-winning journalist who hosts All Things Considered along with Ari Shapiro, Audie Cornish, and Mary Louise Kelly. She landed in public radio after practicing law for a few years.
Chang is a former Planet Money correspondent, where she got to geek out on the law while covering the underground asylum industry in the largest Chinatown in America, privacy rights in the cell phone age, the government's doomed fight to stop racist trademarks, and the money laundering case federal agents built against one of President Trump's top campaign advisers.
Previously, she was a congressional correspondent with NPR's Washington Desk. She covered battles over healthcare, immigration, gun control, executive branch appointments, and the federal budget.
Chang started out as a radio reporter in 2009, and has since earned a string of national awards for her work. In 2012, she was honored with the Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Silver Baton for her investigation into the New York City Police Department's "stop-and-frisk" policy and allegations of unlawful marijuana arrests by officers. The series also earned honors from Investigative Reporters and Editors and the Society of Professional Journalists.
She was also the recipient of the Daniel Schorr Journalism Award, a National Headliner Award, and an honor from Investigative Reporters and Editors for her investigation on how Detroit's broken public defender system leaves lawyers with insufficient resources to effectively represent their clients.
In 2011, the New York State Associated Press Broadcasters Association named Chang as the winner of the Art Athens Award for General Excellence in Individual Reporting for radio. In 2015, she won a National Journalism Award from the Asian American Journalists Association for her coverage of Capitol Hill.
Prior to coming to NPR, Chang was an investigative reporter at NPR Member station WNYC from 2009 to 2012 in New York City, focusing on criminal justice and legal affairs. She was a Kroc fellow at NPR from 2008 to 2009, as well as a reporter and producer for NPR Member station KQED in San Francisco.
The former lawyer served as a law clerk to Judge John T. Noonan Jr. on the United States Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit in San Francisco.
Chang graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Stanford University where she received her bachelor's degree.
She earned her law degree with distinction from Stanford Law School, where she won the Irving Hellman Jr. Special Award for the best piece written by a student in the Stanford Law Review in 2001.
Chang was also a Fulbright Scholar at Oxford University, where she received a master's degree in media law. She also has a master's degree in journalism from Columbia University.
She grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area, where she never got to have a dog. But now she's the proud mama of Mickey Chang, a shih tzu who enjoys slapping high-fives and mingling with senators.
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Arizona has seen rising support for abortion rights among Latinos. The reasons are varied and complicated. -
School is back in session, and the line between providing campus security and allowing for free speech is still extremely thin. -
NPR's Ailsa Chang talks with Aneri Pattani of KFF Health News about guidelines for spending opioid settlement money issued by nearly 200 harm reduction and recovery organizations.
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NPR's Ailsa Chang talks with Bloomberg News' Madison Muller, who reported on a Kentucky city that has one of the highest concentrations of people with weight loss drug prescriptions in the country.
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NPR’s Ailsa Chang speaks with Anna Edney, health care reporter with Bloomberg, about her reporting on how some generic versions of cold medicine contain a cancer-causing chemical.
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Louis Cole is a prolific musician known primarily as a drummer, but whose music over the past decade has fallen in the nexus of jazz, funk and rock. Now he's in a whole new space. -
NPR's Ailsa Chang talks with Dr. Aileen Gariepy of Weill Cornell Medicine about the new federal guidance that advises doctors to consider pain management for IUD insertion pain.
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California's newest state park just opened this summer — and a visit is like stepping into a time machine as its creators reimagine what a state park can be. -
IUDs are a safe and reliable form of birth control, but many people struggle to get simple answers about the device. NPR’s Ailsa Chang talks with Mia Armstrong-Lopez, who wrote about this for Slate.
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Hawaii Gov. Josh Green, a Democrat and a close ally of President Biden, says it's still unclear whether Biden will maintain his bid for a second term. "The president has to make this decision," Green told NPR.
