Laurel Wamsley
Laurel Wamsley is a reporter for NPR's News Desk. She reports breaking news for NPR's digital coverage, newscasts, and news magazines, as well as occasional features. She was also the lead reporter for NPR's coverage of the 2019 Women's World Cup in France.
Wamsley got her start at NPR as an intern for Weekend Edition Saturday in January 2007 and stayed on as a production assistant for NPR's flagship news programs, before joining the Washington Desk for the 2008 election.
She then left NPR, doing freelance writing and editing in Austin, Texas, and then working in various marketing roles for technology companies in Austin and Chicago.
In November 2015, Wamsley returned to NPR as an associate producer for the National Desk, where she covered stories including Hurricane Matthew in coastal Georgia. She became a Newsdesk reporter in March 2017, and has since covered subjects including climate change, possibilities for social networks beyond Facebook, the sex lives of Neanderthals, and joke theft.
In 2010, Wamsley was a Journalism and Women Symposium Fellow and participated in the German-American Fulbright Commission's Berlin Capital Program, and was a 2016 Voqal Foundation Fellow. She will spend two months reporting from Germany as a 2019 Arthur F. Burns Fellow, a program of the International Center for Journalists.
Wamsley earned a B.A. with highest honors from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she was a Morehead-Cain Scholar. Wamsley holds a master's degree from Ohio University, where she was a Public Media Fellow and worked at NPR Member station WOUB. A native of Athens, Ohio, she now lives and bikes in Washington, DC.
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For the first time since 2004, there will be no Usain Bolt scorching the track. That means a new generation of speed demons is looking to make its mark. -
The city surpassed a record that had been set a day earlier, notching more than 3,000 new cases on Tuesday. For the first time in four days, no Olympic athletes tested positive for the coronavirus.
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Chiles had been slated to compete in just two events in the team final: vault and floor. But with Biles out of the competition, she was suddenly competing on the balance beam and uneven bars too.
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Los Angeles joins California, New York City and the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs announced new, more stringent policies, and possible penalties, to push vaccination among their employees.
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Gestures of protest have already begun. But exactly what's allowed under the International Olympic Committee's new rules on expression is somewhat murky.
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From pictogram people to a moving rendition of "Imagine," the Tokyo Olympics' opening ceremony balanced fun with the seriousness of the moment.
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Cases of the variant have popped up in several states. But neither the WHO nor the CDC considers it a variant of concern, and the fast-spreading delta variant continues to dominate U.S. cases.
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The Amazon founder became the second billionaire this month to reach the edge of space — following Richard Branson, who rocketed there aboard a vessel made by his company Virgin Galactic.
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Prime Minister Boris Johnson is in self-isolation following close contact with the UK health secretary, who announced he had tested positive for the coronavirus. Cases in the U.K. are rising fast.
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Richard Branson started Virgin Galactic 17 years ago to make space travel possible for his generation. This weekend he'll be on its first fully crewed test flight to space, beating Jeff Bezos by days.
