BENJAMIN RYAN
I am an independent journalist, specializing in science and health care coverage. I contribute to The New York Times, NBC News, The Free Press, UnHerd and The New York Sun. I have also written for The Atlantic, The Washington Post, The Guardian, Compact, The Nation, Thomson Reuters Foundation, New York, the New York Post, The Marshall Project, PBS, The Village Voice, The New York Observer, Money, Men's Journal, City & State, Quartz, Out and The Advocate.
Subscribe to my Substack: Hazard Ratio. And follow me on Twitter and Bluesky.
I am particularly interested in public health, medicine and psychology and how the science of each field intersects with public policy and litigation.
After six years of volunteer work in the HIV field beginning in 1995 when I was in high school in Seattle, I started my journalism career reporting on that epidemic. I was an editor at large at HIV Plus and then at POZ and its sister magazines, Hep and Cancer Health, where I covered scientific research about HIV, viral hepatitis and cancer. Today, I am one of just a handful of reporters writing for mainstream publications who maintains a speciality in covering HIV.
In my investigative work, I exposed in The Guardian Gov. Rick Scott's administration for overseeing the effective blocking of $70 million to combat Florida's HIV crisis. For NBC News, I detailed how right-wing scrutiny of transgender care in Tennessee led Gov. Rick Lee to ax $8.3 million in federal HIV funds. I broke new ground in the details behind Harvey Weinstein's questionable financial dealings with the HIV charity amfAR. And I assisted with a Times investigation into nursing homes that are hotbeds of a highly fatal drug-resistant fungal infection.
My reporting has routinely advanced knowledge about the besieged field of pediatric gender medicine, including by: uncovering internal discord about the subject at the American Medical Association, American Academy of Pediatrics, McMaster University and Washington State University; revealing the increasingly short assessment period Boston Children's Hospital provides patients seeking gender-transition medications; and exposing a culture of rigid ideological and intellectual conformity at the World Professional Association for Transgender Health. I was the only reporter to attend the entire three-week trial of the first "detransitioner" to sue their care providers and go before the jury.
I graduated cum laude, which is awarded to the top quarter of the class, from Columbia University in 2001.
I received the 2023 Occupational and Environmental Medicine Media Excellence Award for written journalism for my article in The Atlantic, Whatever Happened to Carpal Tunnel Syndrome? My work has also received multiple awards from NLGJA: The Association of LGBTQ Journalists. This includes the Excellence in HIV/AIDS Coverage Award, once for a 2014 article in POZ about pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) against HIV, and then for my 2019 Rick Scott investigation; and an Excellence in Profile Writing Award for my 2020 article in The Guardian about how the HIV epidemic prepared Dr. Anthony Fauci to battle Covid-19.
I am often a guest on TV, radio and podcasts. I have appeared on Sirius Satellite Radio, NPR, Blocked and Reported, iHeart Radio's Daily Dive podcast, Dan Savage's Savage Love, AM Update with Megyn Kelly, Meghan Daum's The Unspeakable, and Owen Jones' podcast, among many others. On TV, I have appeared on CBS News, Al Jazeera and NBC News Now.
My photography has accompanied my reporting in The Guardian, NBC News and POZ. I shoot with a Canon 5D Mark IV.
The son of a general surgeon and an English teacher and academic, I grew up in the heart of Seattle, where I had the unusual experience of attending the same small progressive school, The Bush School, from kindergarten through high school. I have called New York City home since my Columbia days, but also spent a semester in Paris and did a stint in Los Angeles.
In my late 20s, I began studying ballet. I ultimately became so serious about the discipline, I spent a school year studying intensively at the Gelsey Kirkland Academy for Classical Ballet when I was 34. Finally, after the Covid-19 pandemic put my training on hold, I realized how nice it was not to be in constant pain from turning out my hips and decided to retire from ballet class at last.
In my spare time, I enjoy reading (novels, psychology, history, memoirs and biography), seeing theater, dance and movies, biking around New York, writing fiction, scrolling Instagram for cute animals, cooking and photography.
I am a cancer survivor, having battled what was first a Stage Ib and then a Stage IIb seminoma beginning in December 2021. Following four cycles of chemotherapy that spanned the summer of 2022, I was cleared of cancer in late August 2022. I was determined not to let the unpleasantness of cancer treatment stop me from reporting about the monkeypox outbreak.
Subscribe to my Substack: Hazard Ratio. And follow me on Twitter and Bluesky.
I am particularly interested in public health, medicine and psychology and how the science of each field intersects with public policy and litigation.
After six years of volunteer work in the HIV field beginning in 1995 when I was in high school in Seattle, I started my journalism career reporting on that epidemic. I was an editor at large at HIV Plus and then at POZ and its sister magazines, Hep and Cancer Health, where I covered scientific research about HIV, viral hepatitis and cancer. Today, I am one of just a handful of reporters writing for mainstream publications who maintains a speciality in covering HIV.
In my investigative work, I exposed in The Guardian Gov. Rick Scott's administration for overseeing the effective blocking of $70 million to combat Florida's HIV crisis. For NBC News, I detailed how right-wing scrutiny of transgender care in Tennessee led Gov. Rick Lee to ax $8.3 million in federal HIV funds. I broke new ground in the details behind Harvey Weinstein's questionable financial dealings with the HIV charity amfAR. And I assisted with a Times investigation into nursing homes that are hotbeds of a highly fatal drug-resistant fungal infection.
My reporting has routinely advanced knowledge about the besieged field of pediatric gender medicine, including by: uncovering internal discord about the subject at the American Medical Association, American Academy of Pediatrics, McMaster University and Washington State University; revealing the increasingly short assessment period Boston Children's Hospital provides patients seeking gender-transition medications; and exposing a culture of rigid ideological and intellectual conformity at the World Professional Association for Transgender Health. I was the only reporter to attend the entire three-week trial of the first "detransitioner" to sue their care providers and go before the jury.
I graduated cum laude, which is awarded to the top quarter of the class, from Columbia University in 2001.
I received the 2023 Occupational and Environmental Medicine Media Excellence Award for written journalism for my article in The Atlantic, Whatever Happened to Carpal Tunnel Syndrome? My work has also received multiple awards from NLGJA: The Association of LGBTQ Journalists. This includes the Excellence in HIV/AIDS Coverage Award, once for a 2014 article in POZ about pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) against HIV, and then for my 2019 Rick Scott investigation; and an Excellence in Profile Writing Award for my 2020 article in The Guardian about how the HIV epidemic prepared Dr. Anthony Fauci to battle Covid-19.
I am often a guest on TV, radio and podcasts. I have appeared on Sirius Satellite Radio, NPR, Blocked and Reported, iHeart Radio's Daily Dive podcast, Dan Savage's Savage Love, AM Update with Megyn Kelly, Meghan Daum's The Unspeakable, and Owen Jones' podcast, among many others. On TV, I have appeared on CBS News, Al Jazeera and NBC News Now.
My photography has accompanied my reporting in The Guardian, NBC News and POZ. I shoot with a Canon 5D Mark IV.
The son of a general surgeon and an English teacher and academic, I grew up in the heart of Seattle, where I had the unusual experience of attending the same small progressive school, The Bush School, from kindergarten through high school. I have called New York City home since my Columbia days, but also spent a semester in Paris and did a stint in Los Angeles.
In my late 20s, I began studying ballet. I ultimately became so serious about the discipline, I spent a school year studying intensively at the Gelsey Kirkland Academy for Classical Ballet when I was 34. Finally, after the Covid-19 pandemic put my training on hold, I realized how nice it was not to be in constant pain from turning out my hips and decided to retire from ballet class at last.
In my spare time, I enjoy reading (novels, psychology, history, memoirs and biography), seeing theater, dance and movies, biking around New York, writing fiction, scrolling Instagram for cute animals, cooking and photography.
I am a cancer survivor, having battled what was first a Stage Ib and then a Stage IIb seminoma beginning in December 2021. Following four cycles of chemotherapy that spanned the summer of 2022, I was cleared of cancer in late August 2022. I was determined not to let the unpleasantness of cancer treatment stop me from reporting about the monkeypox outbreak.