Sara Israelsen-Hartley

Sara Israelsen-Hartley is an award-winning policy journalist who writes about public health problems and solutions.

 

​​Over more than 20 years of reporting, Sara has written on a wide ranges of topics, including COVID-19, water fluoridation, mammograms, radon gas exposure, teens and anxiety, gender-based wage inequalities, divorce reform, pornography, abortion, city politics, and the judicial system. Her favorite reporting projects are those that invite community engagement and highlight solutions.

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In 2023 she completed a master's degree at Duke University's Sanford School of Public Policy with a concentration in health policy. She studied nutrition security, social determinants of health, dental and mental health and their impact on chronic absenteeism, medical misinformation, and vaccine hesitancy and reporting.

 

She is an adjunct instructor in the DeWitt Wallace Center for Media & Democracy in the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University.

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She is also a Research and Writing Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School Government Performance Lab where she writes, edits, and designs publications about how governments can improve the services they provide for residents.

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A native of Missouri, Sara and her family now call North Carolina home. When she's not writing, she's probably on a walk with her husband, Jon, playing games with their three increasingly tall sons, or running around the basketball court.