Executive Director and Editor-in-Chief
Jim Morris is founder of Public Health Watch and has been a journalist since 1978, focusing on public health and the environment. He has received more than 80 awards for his work, including the George Polk award, the Sidney Hillman award, three National Association of Science Writers awards, two national Edward R. Murrow awards and five Texas Headliners awards. Morris spent more than 13 years with the Center for Public Integrity, a nonprofit investigative news organization in Washington, D.C., as a senior reporter, managing editor, acting CEO and executive editor. While there, he directed a global investigation of the asbestos industry that won the John B. Oakes award for environmental reporting from Columbia University and an IRE Medal from Investigative Reporters and Editors in 2011. In 2013, Morris and two colleagues received the Edgar A. Poe award for national reporting from the White House Correspondents’ Association for “Hard Labor,” a series on health and safety threats to American workers. Morris helped edit “Breathless and Burdened,” a 2013 investigation into the flawed federal black lung benefits program that won the Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting. He conceived, and was a lead writer on, the 2014 series “Big Oil, Bad Air,” a collaboration with InsideClimate News and The Weather Channel that garnered 10 national awards for its revelations about toxic air emissions from hydraulic fracturing. Morris has worked for newspapers in Texas and California as well as publications such as U.S. News & World Report and Congressional Quarterly in Washington. He can be reached at jmorris@publichealthwatch.org.
Editors
David Fritze assists Public Health Watch in content and operations, including editing, audience engagement, fundraising, web display, visuals and general consulting. He was executive editor of the award-winning investigative news organization Oklahoma Watch from 2012 to 2020, leading dramatic growth in audience, funding and impact. Previously, he was an editor and reporter at The Arizona Republic for two decades, serving as an enterprise, business, metro and national editor. He was part of the newsroom mega-team whose coverage of the mass shooting in Tucson that killed six and wounded 13, including U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in breaking news. Earlier he was a reporter at the Dallas Times Herald and an editor and writer at Oklahoma Monthly magazine. He can be reached at dfritze@publichealthwatch.org.
Susan White is an independent investigative editor who has edited three Pulitzer Prize-winning projects. She was the first assigning editor hired by ProPublica, where she edited Sheri Fink’s Pulitzer-winning “Five Days at Memorial,” about the collapse of health care at a New Orleans hospital in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. At ProPublica she also edited groundbreaking reporting on hydraulic fracturing, which won a George Polk Award for environmental reporting. As executive editor of InsideClimate News, she edited its Pulitzer-winning project “The Dilbit Disaster: Inside the Biggest Oil Spill You’ve Never Heard of.” At the San Diego Union-Tribune she was an editor on the project that sent former Congressman Randy Cunningham to prison for tax evasion and conspiracy to commit bribery, mail fraud and wire fraud.
Writers
Casey Beck is a professor at Tulane University and an award-winning documentary filmmaker. Her debut short film Mongolia: Land Without Fences premiered online on Frontline/World in 2007. After completing a Fulbright scholarship in Argentina, she was the first unit director of Ballplayer: Pelotero, a New York Times’ Critics Pick. Beck’s films about water contamination, Downstream (2018) and The Great Divide (2020), have won numerous awards and been screened around the globe.
Mary Cardaras has been a journalist for more than 40 years and is an associate professor and chair of communication at California State University, East Bay, where she teaches journalism, documentary production and political communication courses. She holds a Ph.D. in public and international affairs and is the recipient of two Emmy awards. Her latest documentary projects include Sunday Dinner, which was featured at the Center for Asian American Media in San Francisco; Downstream, and The Great Divide.
Kim Krisberg is an Austin-based journalist with 20 years of experience reporting on public health science, practice and policy. She’s a longtime contributor to The Nation’s Health newspaper at the American Public Health Association, and her work has appeared in publications such as the Texas Tribune, Austin Monthly, Medscape, The Washington Blade, The Pump Handle and Texas Hospitals. She can be reached at kkrisberg@publichealthwatch.org.
David Leffler is an Austin-based staff reporter for Public Health Watch, where he covers toxic chemical pollution and other environmental health issues. His work has produced two enterprise investigations. The first, “A Texas County Wants to Punish Polluters. The State Won’t Let It,” explored the environmental justice battle between oil-backed Texas politicians and young, local elected officials of color in Houston. The second, “For Years, the EPA and Texas Ignored Warning Signs at a Chemical Storage Site. Then an Inferno Erupted,” connected nearly two decades of federal and state negligence to an industrial fire that spewed the carcinogen benzene into communities. David is a 2023 Livingston Award finalist and his work has appeared in The Washington Post, Grist, The Texas Tribune and Texas Monthly. He can be reached at dleffler@publichealthwatch.org.
Savanna Strott is a Las Vegas-based journalist who covers environmental health for Public Health Watch and also writes for The Nevada Independent. Her work has been published by outlets including Grist, the Texas Observer and the Investigative Reporting Workshop. She can be reached at sstrott@publichealthwatch.org.
Mary Tuma is an Austin-based journalist who focuses on reproductive rights. Her reporting has appeared in The Guardian, VICE, the Texas Observer, Rewire News Group, HuffPost, The Progressive, Ms. Magazine, and more. She worked as a staff reporter for The Austin Chronicle, San Antonio Current and The American Independent News Network.
Daisy Yuhas is a science journalist and editor based in Austin. She is an editor for Scientific American’s “Mind Matters” column, which explores insights from brain and behavioral science. Previously, she has served as features editor for SAPIENS magazine, a columnist for The Hechinger Report, and an associate editor at Scientific American, where she edited stories for Scientific American MIND. Daisy has written for publications that include The New York Times for Kids, Audubon magazine, NBC News and Newsweek.
Audio Journalist
Jordan Gass-Poore’ an award-winning podcast producer and investigative journalist with more than a decade of journalism experience. Presently, Jordan is the creator, senior producer, reporter and host of “Hazard NJ,” a limited-series podcast about the impacts of climate change on hazardous Superfund sites in New Jersey. “Hazard NJ” is a production of NJ Spotlight News, the news division of NJ PBS, and is the outlet’s first podcast. Prior to this, Jordan was a producer of CNN’s podcasts, “Chasing Life” and “Coronavirus: Fact vs Fiction,” both hosted by Dr. Sanjay Gupta. She was also a producer of the award-winning investigative podcast “Sounds Like Hate,” created by the Southern Poverty Law Center and Until 20 Productions, and the executive producer of the Queens Memory podcast, “The Borough We Became: Queens Residents On Life During COVID-19,” which won the 2021 Third Coast “Impact” award. She has a master’s degree in investigative journalism from City, University of London and a bachelor’s degree in journalism and English from Texas State University
Multimedia Coordinator/Researcher
Andrew Morris oversees social media and conducts research for Public Health Watch. Based in Austin, he previously worked in television and film production and as a communications fellow at the Center for Health, Environment and Justice. He can be reached at amorris@publichealthwatch.org.