The Stanford Center for Innovation in Global Health is proud to announce the 2024-25 Global Health Media Fellow: Neha Mukherjee, a second-year medical student at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York and a magna cum laude graduate of Brown University. As an aspiring emergency medicine physician, she hopes to work both abroad and domestically to treat and educate underserved patient populations. 

Mukherjee brings strong experience in global and public health research and outreach, as well as in journalism. Her global and public health interests include girls’ access to education and healthcare in India, tracking the spread of infectious diseases through travel screenings in emergency departments, and the health of immigrants and vulnerable populations in the US.

“I am passionate about global health storytelling to elevate voices that often go unheard in our current media landscape, but which have the capacity to create international understanding and inspire change,” she said. 

Mukherjee’s work has appeared in NBC News, the Philadelphia Inquirer, and WIRED, and she has contributed to reporting about the COVID-19 pandemic during an internship at NBC News. She’s excited to use her fellowship to enhance her journalistic writing skills and explore long-form storytelling as well as data journalism. 

Ultimately, she hopes to use her media fellowship training to become a trusted medical voice who can effectively bridge the information gap between doctors and patients. She aspires to be a physician-communicator who can both empathetically explain a diagnosis to a patient and write compellingly about a complex global health issue. 

“There is vast knowledge in the medical community, but so often the general public is left with countless questions,” said Mukherjee. “Even when we have the answers, it can be difficult to communicate them in an accessible way.  This fellowship is the ideal opportunity for me to learn how to close this information gap.”

Mukherjee is the 14th fellow to be selected for this unique program designed to create a generation of physician-storytellers who can shine a light on under-reported global health challenges and build health literacy among populations not traditionally served by mainstream media. 

The fellowship enables a medical school student each year to master the principles of storytelling and multimedia and medical journalism through journalism school training and an intensive internship with Sanjay Gupta at CNN, as well as a capstone global health project. Alumni, most of them practicing doctors, now convey medical insights and expertise through compelling television interviews, engaging blogs and podcasts, and persuasive op-eds. Others have gone on to create new training programs for future physician-communicators.

Mukherjee begins her fellowship in September, 2024.