Rhitu Chatterjee

Rhitu Chatterjee is an editor at National Public Radio’s food blog, The Salt, where she edits stories about science, health, environment, history and culture through the lens of food. As a science journalist for over a decade, Rhitu has covered a range of issues and stories around the globe. From 2013 to 2016, Chatterjee was a New Delhi-based contributing correspondent for Science magazine and the public radio program, PRI’s The World. Chatterjee is drawn to stories at the intersection of science and society as well as stories about the human experience in times of social, economic and cultural transitions. In recent years, she has spent much of her time covering gender issues in South Asia. Some of her favorite recent assignments have been about gender violence and women’s rights movements in India as well as essays about life in the developing world. In 2015, she co-hosted a week-long series on gender issues in India on PRI’s The World. In 2014, Chatterjee received a reporting grant from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting to investigate India’s free school lunch program, one of the largest anti-poverty programs in the world. In 2015, she got another Pulitzer Center grant to investigate the successes and failures of Brazil’s school lunch program. Her stories about an epidemic of a mysterious kind of chronic kidney disease in Sri Lanka and a 12-year-old Indian girl’s struggles navigating changing gender roles were both finalists for the South Asian Journalism Association’s journalism awards. Chatterjee did her undergraduate work in Darjeeling and she holds an M.A. in journalism from the University of Missouri, Columbia.