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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Amid a steep spike in cases, more than 3.6 million Slovaks were tested for the virus — about two-thirds of the country. The prime minister hopes the testing can ward off a more severe lockdown. -
At a series of listening sessions, participants voiced worries that the development of a COVID-19 vaccine is being politicized and rushed. Public health experts are taking vaccine hesitancy seriously. -
"The situation in the United States continues to be of concern. So we're going to make sure we're keeping Canadians safe as best as we can," Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said. -
The rules issued last week limited indoor public gatherings to no more than 25% of total occupancy limits. The state's Tavern League argued the caps would effectively put its members out of business. -
The move by Eli Lilly came less than 24 hours after Johnson & Johnson paused further dosing in all of its COVID-19 vaccine candidate clinical trials while it investigated a volunteer's illness. -
Door-to-door trick-or-treating and crowded costume parties are out, and haunted forests and outdoor movie nights are in. "If screaming will likely occur, greater distancing is advised," the CDC says. -
The CDC says the guidelines were posted to its website in error. The now-deleted updates were notable because so far the agency has stopped short of saying that the virus is airborne. -
FEMA says pandemic-related funding is available from other sources, including millions of masks from Health and Human Services. Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden blasts the policy change. -
Although daily COVID-19 deaths have fallen somewhat in recent days, the number of infections has continued to rise in many places with no end in sight. -
The hunt is on to find the source of the coronavirus outbreak, now at 30 cases. The country is working to understand how the virus slipped through its defenses.
