Shankar Vedantam

Shankar Vedantam is a national reporter and columnist at The Washington Post. His weekly column, Department of Human Behavior, is reprinted widely across the United States and in several other countries. Vedantam is also working on a book, under contract with Random House, that explores some of the themes of the newspaper column. He is the winner of the Templeton-Cambridge Fellowship on Science and Religion in 2005, the World Health Organization Journalism Fellowship in 2003-2004 and the Rosalyn Carter Mental Health Journalism Fellowship in 2002-2003. He has won prizes from the Society of Professional Journalists, the South Asian Journalist Association, the Asian American Journalists Association, the Pennsylvania Newspaper Association and the American Public Health Association. He worked at The Philadelphia Inquirer, Knight-Ridder’s Washington Bureau and New York Newsday.