Jon Hamilton
Jon Hamilton is a correspondent for NPR's Science Desk. Currently he focuses on neuroscience and health risks.
In 2014, Hamilton went to Liberia as part of the NPR team that covered Ebola. The team received a Peabody Award for its coverage.
Following the 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Japan, Hamilton was part of NPR's team of science reporters and editors who went to Japan to cover the crisis at the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant.
Hamilton contributed several pieces to the Science Desk series "The Human Edge," which looked at what makes people the most versatile and powerful species on Earth. His reporting explained how humans use stories, how the highly evolved human brain is made from primitive parts, and what autism reveals about humans' social brains.
In 2009, Hamilton received the Michael E. DeBakey Journalism Award for his piece on the neuroscience behind treating autism.
Before joining NPR in 1998, Hamilton was a media fellow with the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation studying health policy issues. He reported on states that have improved their Medicaid programs for the poor by enrolling beneficiaries in private HMOs.
From 1995-1997, Hamilton wrote on health and medical topics as a freelance writer, after having been a medical reporter for both The Commercial Appeal and Physician's Weekly.
Hamilton graduated with honors from Oberlin College in Ohio with a Bachelor of Arts in English. As a student, he was the editor of the Oberlin Review student newspaper. He earned his master's degree in journalism from Columbia University, where he graduated with honors. During his time at Columbia, Hamilton was awarded the Baker Prize for magazine writing and earned a Sherwood traveling fellowship.
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Researchers launched a major study of an experimental Alzheimer's drug this summer. They also learned a lot about how to protect participants who must make frequent visits to a medical center. -
Two new human studies back earlier hints that vaccines designed to prevent respiratory infections might also provide some protection against Alzheimer's disease.
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After a decade of failure in treating Alzheimer's with drugs, the National Institutes of Health is funding a five-year effort in Seattle to learn more about how the disease starts in the brain.
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Tests for the immune response to the coronavirus are revealing thousands of people who were infected but never got severely ill. The findings suggest the virus is less deadly than it first appeared.
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Syllables are the building blocks of spoken language. And now a study of brain activity hints at how we extract them from a stream of speech.
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Brain scans of 104 boys and girls doing basic math tasks found no gender differences. The finding adds to the evidence that boys and girls start out with equal ability in math.
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Scientists are gaining insights into why Alzheimer's is more common in women. The answer involves genetics, hormones and sex-related brain differences.
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Genetic tests can now tell us a lot about our risk for developing Alzheimer's disease. But that doesn't mean people are prepared to receive the information.
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Researchers are using brain scans, blood and spinal fluid to detect early signs of Alzheimer's disease. These "biomarkers" may also offer a quicker way to test new Alzheimer's drugs.
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Research suggests the winter blues are triggered by specialized light-sensing cells in the retina that communicate directly with brain areas involved in mood.
