A New Role for Azeen Ghorayshi

Over the past five years as a reporter on the Health and Science desk, Azeen Ghorayshi has become known for taking on challenging and fraught subjects, from gender to mental health, and reporting her way into them with compassion and clear-eyed explanatory writing. I'm pleased to announce that she is now stepping into a new role, where she'll be working with Jessica Lustig with a focus on nuanced and high-impact enterprise features that explore the intersection of science and society. Azeen's role will have outputs in both the Magazine and the wider newsroom. She'll have one foot here as a staff writer, and one foot on Health and Science, where she'll continue to break news and jump on stories like her recent collaborative investigative work with David Fahrenthold and Maggie Astor on the doctors who served Jeffrey Epstein and the women he sent to them .

Azeen's talent for Magazine-scale storytelling was on clear display last year in her landmark podcast, "The Protocol." The six-part series told the story of the origins of youth gender medicine, those it was meant to help, and how exploding legal and political fights could end the practice altogether in the U.S. This project grew out of her impressive work covering the youth gender medicine beat since her arrival at The Times in 2021 from BuzzFeed (where she was a reporter and editor on the science and investigation desks). There are few beats as contentious as youth gender medicine has been over the past five years, and, Azeen has covered it with painstaking , sensitive, deeply sourced and rigorous reporting that never shied away from complexities and illuminated and explained the issues without taking sides.

Azeen has also written about in vitro fertilization, sexuality and SSRIs, and further widened her focus to autism, reporting on the debate over the expansion of the diagnosis as well as the contested link of acetaminophen in pregnancy and autism, and how President Trump and his Health Secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., have politicized the issue.

This is an exciting new chapter for Azeen. Please join us in congratulating her on this new role, and welcoming her to the Magazine.

- Jake and Hilary