Health Coverage Fellowship moves to Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health’s Center for Health Communication
Boston, MA – The Health Coverage Fellowship, which has trained more than 275 journalists over two decades, will move to the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health on Jan. 1, 2025, as the School deepens its commitment to supporting credible and effective communication on critical health issues.
Directed by veteran journalist Larry Tye, the nine-day fellowship brings journalists from across the U.S. to Boston to learn from health officials, practitioners, researchers, and patients through lectures, workshops, field trips to labs and clinics, and ride-alongs with case workers. The program focuses on pressing issues in public health, such as pandemics, mental illness, climate change, health care costs, and racial and ethnic inequities.
Tye, who covered health and environmental issues for the Boston Globe for 15 years, has directed the program since its launch in 2002 by the Blue Cross Blue Shield Foundation of Massachusetts Foundation and will continue to lead it at its new home at Harvard Chan School’s Center for Health Communication. A former Nieman Fellow and author of nine books, Tye has taught journalism at Boston University, Northeastern, Tufts, and Harvard.
BCBSMAF will continue to support the fellowship in its new home. Additional support for the fellowship has come from the Bower Foundation in Mississippi, Connecticut Health Foundation, Endowment for Health in New Hampshire, Fledgling Fund, KFF, Maine Health Access Foundation, National Institute for Health Care Management Foundation, Rita Allen Foundation, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and, in Texas, the Episcopal Health Foundation, Congregational Collective at the H.E. Butt Foundation, Methodist Healthcare Ministries, and St. David’s Foundation.
Applications for the 2025 fellowship are now open.
About the Center for Health Communication:
Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health’s Center for Health Communication defines, teaches, and shares best practices for communicating credible health information in an increasingly skeptical and fragmented world. Founded in 1985, the Center was the first health communication program at an academic institution and offered a first-of-its-kind health journalism fellowship. Today the Center, which sits in the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences and is directed by faculty member Amanda Yarnell, offers students and faculty resources, training, and mentorship in health and science communication. It continues to support both journalists and creators who provide health information to their communities. And it conducts innovative research into how creators—and the content they provide—influence people’s health beliefs and behaviors.
