Sharon Lerner, ProPublica

Sharon Lerner covers health and the environment. She joined ProPublica in 2022 after seven years as an investigative reporter at The Intercept, where she focused on failures of the environmental regulatory process as well as biosafety and pandemic profiteering.

Lerner has reported extensively on PFAS — a family of chemicals linked to cancer, infertility, developmental harm and immune dysfunction — detailing how manufacturers of the chemicals covered up the danger for decades. She also broke the news that firefighting foam used by the military contained PFAS and that GenX, a PFAS compound that DuPont created to replace the cancer-causing compound PFOA, also causes cancer. With colleagues at The Intercept, Lerner obtained grant materials that revealed that the U.S. had funded risky virus research in Wuhan, China.

Lerner's work has been honored by the Society of Environmental Journalists ten times, and by the Newswomen’s Club of New York, which named her its journalist of the year in 2021.