Laurie Garrett, the author of The Coming Plague, is an award-winning journalist and author focusing on science and public health issues. She won the Pulitzer Prize in 1996 for her work on reporting the story of an Ebola outbreak in Zaire. She is most well known for her books, especially The Coming Plague and Betrayal of Trust: The Collapse of Global Public Health, the latter of which was recognized with the George Polk Award. Garrett holds a BS in biology from Merrill College and has served as a senior fellow in the Global Health Program of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Garrett’s work has been recognized as significant for her ability to see the connections between multiple areas of complexity and deal with them in an even-handed way. Her writings are notable for their thoroughness and clarity in addressing microbiology, genetics, and epidemiology issues. At the same time, she also has a broad view of the social, political, cultural, and environmental factors that play into the spread of infectious diseases. Her ability to draw connections between these micro- and macro-factors, and to articulate them to a nonprofessional audience, made her one of the leading figures in public health journalism, particularly from the 1990s through the 2010s.