2014 Kathleen Foley Journalist Award

Judy Foreman

 The Boston Globe

Judy Foreman is a nationally syndicated medical journalist with 40 years of deadline writing under her belt. She was a staff writer at The Boston Globe for 23 years, and a medical specialist and science writer since 1985, covering all sorts of health issues—fitness, aging, cancer, heart disease, pain, nutrition, and basic biological sciences.

She graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Wellesley College in 1966. After 3 years in the Peace Corps in Brazil, she earned a master’s in education for general purposes from Harvard University Graduate School of Education.

After moving to the Globe, she wrote for the Living section, then enjoyed a stint as a guest reporter at The Times of London for six months in 1982. Then, after becoming a science and medical writer, she won a Knight Science Journalism Fellowship at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1989-1990.

For years, she wrote the weekly Health Sense column for the Globe‘s Health & Science section; the column offers reader-friendly, practical medical advice for consumers. Her column was syndicated internationally through United Media in New York. In 2000, she left her staff job at the Globe to write the column freelance for The Boston Globe, The Los Angeles Times, The Dallas Morning News, and many others, including foreign outlets through Featurewell, a syndicate.

She has also appeared on WBUR, the NPR affiliate in Boston, and has been the host of a weekly, call-in webcast on health issues for Healthtalk.com. She now blogs regularly for WBUR’s Cognoscenti and Commonhealth Websites.

She has won more than 50 journalism awards, including from groups such as National Headliners Awards, the American Society on Aging, the National Women’s Political Caucus, the American Heart Association, the Arthritis Foundation, the Associated Press Sports Editors, and the Clarion award, among others.

She also co-wrote the script for a video documentary about a young woman dying of breast cancer that won the 1998 George Foster Peabody award.

In addition to being a columnist, she was a lecturer on medicine at Harvard Medical School and a consultant/patient advocate at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center from 2001 to 2004. She was also an affiliated scholar in the Women’s Studies Research Center at Brandeis University.

The award is named for Dr. Foley in recognition of her contributions to furthering professional and public understanding about the need for effective cancer and end-of-life pain management. She is an attending neurologist for the Pain and Palliative Care Service at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York and director of the Project on Death in America sponsored by the Open Society Institute.