About Helen Ouyang

I’m an emergency physician, Associate Professor in Emergency Medicine at Columbia University, and contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine. I am also a fellow at the Type Media Center. I’ve written for The Atlantic, Harper’s, Los Angeles Times, New York, The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and others. My writing has been a finalist for the National Magazine Award, anthologized in The Best American Science and Nature Writing, and funded by The Pulitzer Center. 

My publications have also appeared in many academic medical journals, including The Lancet and JAMA, and I currently serve as a reviewer for Annals of Emergency Medicine and Disaster Medicine and Public Health Preparedness. I am also a mentor-editor for The OpEd Project. Until 2015, I was the Associate Director of Columbia’s International Emergency Medicine Fellowship. I’ve worked in 20 countries across five continents in public health and humanitarian assistance.

After graduating with a bachelor of arts from Brown University, I went to medical school at Johns Hopkins and studied for a master’s in public health at Harvard, where I was also a Zuckerman Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government’s Center for Public Leadership. Upon completing my training at Harvard, at the Massachusetts General Hospital and Brigham & Women’s Hospital, I moved out to the Pacific Northwest before finding my way back to the East Coast.