Vikki Valentine is a senior editor on NPR’s science desk, overseeing the network’s global health and development coverage across radio and digital platforms. She leads a team of broadcast, digital and multimedia journalists to help bring stories of the developing world to American audiences. In 2014, she helped launch the NPR blog, Goats & Soda: Stories Of Life In A Changing World. Prior to working on global health, Valentine was the network’s climate change, energy and environment editor.
Valentine led NPR’s Peabody-award winning coverage of the Ebola epidemic in West Africa and was a key editor in the network’s coverage of the 2011 nuclear disaster at Fukushima and Hurricane Sandy in 2012. She has produced major series such as a 2012 investigation examining the unanswered health questions surrounding fracking for natural gas, and the 2013 series Poisoned Places: Toxic Air, Neglected Communities. She edited a 2012 DuPont-winning story on a doctor gag-rule law in Pennsylvania connected with fracking, and a 2013 Edward R. Murrow-winning story on Pennsylvania’s abandoned oil and gas wells.
Valentine won the 2009 National Academies Communication Award for the year-long multimedia project Climate Connections. The series was also a finalist for the 2008 National Academy of Sciences award, the Metcalf award for environmental journalism, the White House News Photographers Association awards, National Headliners awards, and the Webbys.
She was part of NPR.org’s 2010 Peabody award-winning team for her editing role in the “Krulwich on Science” series and health overhaul coverage. She was recognized by the Awards for Excellence in Health Care Journalism and Webbys for her supervising role in NPR’s digital health overhaul coverage.
Prior to joining NPR, Valentine worked as a daily science news editor at Discovery.com and as a features editor at BaltimoreSun.com. Her writing — from science to cultural profiles — has been published by The New York Times, National Geographic, Smithsonian Channel, Marketplace, Science Magazine and Washingtonian.
Valentine received a master’s with honors from the University College London Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine, and graduated magna cum laude from the University of Maryland Baltimore County, with a major in English and minors in anthropology and writing.