Selena Simmons-Duffin
Selena Simmons-Duffin reports on health policy for NPR.
She has worked at NPR for ten years as a show editor and producer, with one stopover at WAMU in 2017 as part of a staff exchange. For four months, she reported local Washington, DC, health stories, including a secretive maternity ward closure and a gesundheit machine.
Before coming to All Things Considered in 2016, Simmons-Duffin spent six years on Morning Edition working shifts at all hours and directing the show. She also drove the full length of the U.S.-Mexico border in 2014 for the "Borderland" series.
She won a Gracie Award in 2015 for creating a video called "Talking While Female," and a 2014 AAAS Kavli Science Journalism Award for producing a series on why you should love your microbes.
Simmons-Duffin attended Stanford University, where she majored in English. She took time off from college to do HIV/AIDS-related work in East Africa. She started out in radio at Stanford's radio station, KZSU, and went on to study documentary radio at the Salt Institute, before coming to NPR as an intern in 2009.
She lives in Washington, DC, with her spouse and kids.
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Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. faced tough questions from senators about a lead poisoning crisis in public schools in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. -
Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is standing firm on the sweeping cuts to the Department of Health and Human Services, cuts he says were suggested by Elon Musk and his DOGE team. -
On Wednesday, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. goes to Capitol Hill to promote and defend his massive overhaul of HHS, and President Trump's plans to change it even more. -
President Trump called for the report in an executive order, titled "Protecting Children From Chemical and Surgical Mutilation." -
The CDC teams that supported local sexual assault prevention groups were 'wiped out' in RFK Jr.'s overhaul of the Department of Health and Human Services. -
Health agency staffers describe a week of widespread uncertainty about who still has a job and how the work will get done as thousands of "reduction in force" notices went out beginning April 1. To many it's the opposite of "government efficiency." -
Staffers began receiving termination notices this morning as part of a major restructuring at HHS. Some senior leadership are on their way out too. -
The reduction in force comes along with a reorganization of the Department of Health and Human Services, consolidating 28 divisions to 15. -
The former TV doctor made it through a tight vote in the Senate with only Republican support. -
The Trump administration cut a clause from federal contracting rules that had been on the books since the 1960s: Companies are no longer explicitly prohibited from having segregated facilities.
