Richard Harris
Journalist, National Public Radio, Author, Rigor Mortis
Richard Harris has covered science, medicine and the environment for National Public Radio since 1986. His award-winning work includes reports in 2010 that revealed the US Government was vastly underestimating the amount of oil spewing from the Macondo blowout in the Gulf of Mexico. He also shared a Peabody award for his reporting on the tobacco industry. In 2014, Harris turned his focus back to biomedical research and came to realize how the enterprise was suffering as a result of a funding pinch and perverse incentives within the field. That led him to write his first book, Rigor Mortis, which focuses on issues underlying the so-called reproducibility crisis. Rigor Mortis was a finalist for the National Academies’ 2018 Communication Award.