Ashley Westerman

Ashley Westerman is a producer who occasionally directs the show. Since joining the staff in June 2015, she has produced a variety of stories including a coal mine closing near her hometown, the 2016 Republican National Convention, and the Rohingya refugee crisis in southern Bangladesh. She is also an occasional reporter for Morning Edition, and NPR.org, where she has contributed reports on both domestic and international news.

Ashley was a summer intern in 2011 with Morning Edition and pitched a story on her very first day. She went on to work as a reporter and host for member station 89.3 WRKF in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, where she earned awards covering everything from healthcare to jambalaya.

Ashley is an East-West Center 2018 Jefferson Fellow and a two-time reporting fellow with the International Center for Journalists. Through ICFJ, she has covered labor issues in her home country of the Philippines for NPR and health care in Appalachia for Voice of America.

A Policy Knot Leaves Oklahomans From Marshall Islands Struggling To Get Health Care

By • Dec 25, 2018

The prairie town of Enid, Okla. — population 50,122 — is best known as the state's "wheat capital." Enid is also home to a community of around 2,000 people who were born in the Marshall Islands. Most are low-income and struggling to get health care.

Changes In Brain Scans Seen After A Single Season Of Football For Young Players

By • Nov 30, 2018

A single season playing football might be all it takes to change a young athlete's brain.

Those are the preliminary findings of research presented this week in Chicago at the annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America.

Researchers used special MRI methods to look at nerve bundles in the brain in a study of the brains of 26 young male football players, average age 12, before and after one season. Twenty-six more young males who didn't play football also got MRI scans at the same time to be used as a control group.

Freaked Out By Your Cat's Scratchy Tongue? Don't Be! It's Keeping Them Cleaner.

By • Nov 21, 2018

Anyone who owns a cat knows the furry beasts can spend an inordinate amount of time grooming themselves. Cats take that sandpaper tongue of theirs and just lick and lick and lick and lick for literally hours a day. But researchers are discovering more about what that tongue, with its hundreds of tiny, backward-facing spines called papillae, is doing.

Another Mass Shooting? 'Compassion Fatigue' Is A Natural Reaction

By & • Nov 9, 2018

Roger Chui first learned about the mass shooting that killed 12 people in a packed bar Wednesday night in Thousand Oaks, Calif., when he woke up the morning after and turned on his phone.

"And I was like 'Oh, that seems really soon after Pittsburgh and Louisville,' " says the software developer in Lexington, Ky. "I thought we'd get more of a break."

Chui feels like these kinds of shootings happen in the U.S. so often now that when he hears about them all he can think about is, "Oh well, it happened again I guess."

He's not alone.