Elisabeth Rosenthal

Elisabeth L. Rosenthal has been the international environment correspondent for The New York Times and the International Herald Tribune since 2004. Previously, Ms. Rosenthal had been a correspondent in The New York Times Beijing bureau since the fall of 1997. During her tenure in Beijing, she broke a number of landmark stories on health in China, including the spread of AIDS as a result of government-sponsored blood buying programs, the demise of the rural health care system, and the global spread of SARS, a new and deadly pneumonia that originated in China. Prior to that she was a metropolitan reporter covering health and hospitals. She was a regular contributor to Science Times for three years before joining The Times in July 1993.

Trained as a physician, Ms. Rosenthal was a contributing editor and columnist at Discover Magazine from 1987 to 1993 during her medical residency. She resumed this role working part time as an emergency room physician at Cornell University-New York Hospital, now part of New York Presbyterian. She was an associate editor, senior editor and contributing editor at Science Digest magazine from 1982 until 1986.

Ms. Rosenthal has won the Asia Society Osborn Elliott Prize and the Front Page Award from the Newswoman’s Club of New York. She has been a Poynter Fellow at Yale and a Ferris Visiting Professor at Princeton.

Ms. Rosenthal received a B.A. and M.A. degree in English literature from Cambridge University, which she attended as a Marshall Scholar, and an M.D. from Harvard Medical School in 1986.