Azeen Ghorayshi

Azeen Ghorayshi has reported extensively on harassment in science. She got her bachelor’s degree at UC Berkeley, where she studied molecular and cellular biology, and a master’s in science communication from Imperial College London. She has previously written for the Guardian, Newsweek, New Scientist, Wired UK, Nautilus, and Mother Jones. Ghorayshi won both the AAAS Kavli Science Journalism Award and the Clark/Payne Award for young science journalists, and was a finalist in the Livingston Award’s national reporting category for her reporting on sexual harassment in science. In 2015, she started on the new science desk at BuzzFeed News, where her beat eventually came to revolve primarily around issues of sex and gender. She covered stories such as reproductive technologies, questions about medical practices dealing with intersex infants, transgender health, HIV, and sexism and sexual harassment in STEM. In October 2015, Ghorayshi published an investigation about Geoff Marcy, who was found by UC Berkeley to have harassed several women over the course of nearly a decade. Marcy resigned from his tenured faculty position at UC Berkeley shortly after the BuzzFeed News report. Thereafter, she reported on two other investigations into professors for sexual harassment and gender discrimination. Both stories continued to shed light on the complex interplay of tenure, grants and institutional accountability that factor into acting on complaints of sexual harassment by students and employees.