Michaeleen Doucleff
Michaeleen Doucleff, PhD, is a correspondent for NPR's Science Desk. For nearly a decade, she has been reporting for the radio and the web for NPR's global health outlet, Goats and Soda. Doucleff focuses on disease outbreaks, cross-cultural parenting, and women and children's health.
In 2014, Doucleff was part of the team that earned a George Foster Peabody award for its coverage of the Ebola outbreak in West Africa. For the series, Doucleff reported on how the epidemic ravaged maternal health and how the virus spreads through the air. In 2019, Doucleff and Senior Producer Jane Greenhalgh produced a story about how Inuit parents teach children to control their anger. That story was the most popular one on NPR.org for the year; altogether readers have spent more than 16 years worth of time reading it.
In 2021, Doucleff published a book, called Hunt, Gather, Parent, stemming from her reporting at NPR. That book became a New York Times bestseller.
Before coming to NPR in 2012, Doucleff was an editor at the journal Cell, where she wrote about the science behind pop culture. Doucleff has a bachelor degree in biology from Caltech, a doctorate in physical chemistry from the University of Berkeley, California, and a master's degree in viticulture and enology from the University of California, Davis.
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The testing system set up by the CDC actually deters doctors from ordering a monkeypox test, and many physicians aren't familiar with the disease, resulting in too few tests and little tracking. -
Researchers say the U.S. monkeypox outbreak is much larger than the CDC is reporting. Symptomatic people are being denied testing, so it's unclear how many people are infected and spreading the virus.
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Scientists in Britain have detected multiple versions of the virus in wastewater. Officials say the risk to the public is extremely low and urge people to ensure their polio vaccines are up to date. -
The monkeypox outbreak has grown to more than 800 cases in dozens of countries. Officials say cases are going undetected because the disease looks different than what's described in medical textbooks.
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Symptoms that doctors were taught about in medical school are not necessarily indicative of the cases of 2022. It can be much more subtle — and look a lot like other diseases. -
Their prediction stemmed from the eradication of smallpox. Here's what they said more than three decades ago — and how it foreshadowed events of 2022. -
Click to see how restrictive or liberal local abortion laws are — and to look at the rate of abortion. The data offers a sense of whether stricter abortion laws reduce the number of abortions.
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Although monkeypox's recent spread has caused concern, its similarities to smallpox have given the public health world a head start on combating it. -
The cases point to possible sexual transmission of this cousin of smallpox — a previously unknown method of spread for monkeypox. -
During the pandemic scientists launched a vaccine in record-breaking time. Their successful use of mRNA technology could lead to progress in the decades-long effort for an HIV inoculation.
