Speaker: Dr. Meredith Wadman, Politics and Policy Reporter, Science Magazine, Washington, D.C.

A senior reporter for Science since 2016, Dr. Wadman has covered the politics and policy of medical research from Washington for 20 years. She has been a staff writer for Nature and a contributing writer at Fortune. Her opinion articles have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times and The Washington Post. Her book The Vaccine Race: Science, Politics and the Human Costs of Defeating Disease, a Washington Post Notable Book of 2017, was named the runner-up science book of the year by The Guardian and short-listed for the Wellcome Book Prize. A native of Vancouver, she began medical school at the University of British Columbia (UBC) and completed her medical degree at Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar. While studying medicine, Dr. Wadman staffed public health clinics in rural Ghana, and worked on paediatrics wards in South Africa during Apartheid.