Emily is the health care and general assignment reporter for The Maine Monitor, a nonprofit, nonpartisan and investigative news outlet published by The Maine Center for Public Interest Reporting.
Previously, Emily was the health reporter for the Sun Journal in Lewiston, Maine. As a 2021 Data Fellow with the USC Center for Health Journalism, she spent six months investigating how the opioid crisis has affected Maine children and families’ well-being. She successfully argued to the Maine Department of Health and Human Services that data from state’s prescription monitoring program were a matter of public health and therefore public record, which made her the first member of the public ever to gain access to data showing where every single opioid pill went for six years ending in 2021.
The resulting series, Legacy of Pain, is one of the deepest investigations into the opioid epidemic in Maine to date.
Emily has also covered the COVID-19 pandemic, including how rural communities struggled to access testing and vaccines; how extreme staffing shortages at the region’s largest hospital and only trauma center forced it to temporarily fold its trauma program; and how burnout and increasing hostility toward health care workers is forcing many out of the profession.
Emily began her career at The Lakes Region, covering nine towns in southern Maine. The Maine Press Association named her the best young journalist in 2021 for her reporting there, which spanned the first year of the pandemic and covered a range of issues, from local government and school matters to broadband access and Black Lives Matter demonstrations. Her reporting followed a controversy involving a local elected official who had allegedly made a racist comment during a public Zoom meeting. Through interviews and public records requests, she confirmed that town officials edited the comment out of the meeting recording and that the same selectmen sent a series of emails containing racial slurs a decade earlier. Her reporting resulted in a citizens' petition to recall the selectmen and his eventual resignation; the town manager left soon after.
Previously, she was founder and editor of Grit Weekly (now archived), an online magazine written by and for young women, was an editorial fellow at KCRW Berlin in Germany and is a regular contributor to Wellesley College’s alumnae magazine.
Emily earned a B.A. in International Relations-History from Wellesley College. She won the senior prize for distinction in IR-History and wrote her honors thesis on the sociopolitical history of Iraq from the Ottoman Empire through the rise of ISIS. She spent a semester abroad studying Arabic in Rabat, Morocco, and was a Fellow at the Madeleine Korbel Albright Institute for Global Affairs.
A native Angeleno, Emily now lives in Portland, Maine, and Brooklyn.