Laurel Wamsley
Laurel Wamsley is a reporter for NPR's News Desk. She reports breaking news for NPR's digital coverage, newscasts, and news magazines, as well as occasional features. She was also the lead reporter for NPR's coverage of the 2019 Women's World Cup in France.
Wamsley got her start at NPR as an intern for Weekend Edition Saturday in January 2007 and stayed on as a production assistant for NPR's flagship news programs, before joining the Washington Desk for the 2008 election.
She then left NPR, doing freelance writing and editing in Austin, Texas, and then working in various marketing roles for technology companies in Austin and Chicago.
In November 2015, Wamsley returned to NPR as an associate producer for the National Desk, where she covered stories including Hurricane Matthew in coastal Georgia. She became a Newsdesk reporter in March 2017, and has since covered subjects including climate change, possibilities for social networks beyond Facebook, the sex lives of Neanderthals, and joke theft.
In 2010, Wamsley was a Journalism and Women Symposium Fellow and participated in the German-American Fulbright Commission's Berlin Capital Program, and was a 2016 Voqal Foundation Fellow. She will spend two months reporting from Germany as a 2019 Arthur F. Burns Fellow, a program of the International Center for Journalists.
Wamsley earned a B.A. with highest honors from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she was a Morehead-Cain Scholar. Wamsley holds a master's degree from Ohio University, where she was a Public Media Fellow and worked at NPR Member station WOUB. A native of Athens, Ohio, she now lives and bikes in Washington, DC.
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Cases of the variant have popped up in several states. But neither the WHO nor the CDC considers it a variant of concern, and the fast-spreading delta variant continues to dominate U.S. cases. -
Prime Minister Boris Johnson is in self-isolation following close contact with the UK health secretary, who announced he had tested positive for the coronavirus. Cases in the U.K. are rising fast. -
Life might feel like it's getting back to normal. But we're not out of the woods yet. Here's what the end of the pandemic might look like. -
The delta variant is the fast-moving strain of the coronavirus now found in 96 countries. It's expected to be the dominant variant in the U.S. within weeks. -
Rescue teams search for any survivors within the sudden mountain of debris. "That's not an old building," said Surfside Mayor Charles Burkett. "That kind of thing should not be happening." -
With her father in charge of her life and her finances, the pop star has practically no autonomy. We spoke with a legal expert about what guardianships do — and what makes Spears' case different. -
The cases have been seen mostly in teens and young adults between 12 and 39 years old. No deaths have been associated with this side effect of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines. -
Tokyo 2020 organizers now face two tests: Preventing the spread of COVID-19 from foreign visitors to residents of Japan, and keeping athletes healthy and virus-free so they can compete. -
This is the first new drug approved for Alzheimer's disease since 2003. It's the first to show significant progress against the sticky brain plaques that are the hallmark of Alzheimer's disease. -
Thousands of pages of Dr. Fauci's emails have been released to reporters. Here's what they tell us about his life and manner during the early months of the pandemic.
