Sheri Fink is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, Emmy-nominated television producer and the author of the New York Times bestselling nonfiction book Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital about choices made in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. She is a producer of the Five Days at Memorial limited series on Apple TV+.

Fink’s work has often explored the impact of crises on health care and is informed by her background as an MD and former relief worker in disaster and conflict zones (she also holds a PhD in neuroscience).

Five Days at Memorial, the recipient of eight book awards, was based on an article investigating patient deaths at Memorial Medical Center. Co-published by ProPublica and the New York Times Magazine, the article won both a Pulitzer Prize and National Magazine Award.

As a news reporter, Fink extensively covered the Covid pandemic and, earlier, the Ebola outbreak in West Africa, sharing Pulitzer Prizes in 2021 and 2015 with New York Times colleagues. Fink’s investigation into how the Ebola epidemic began in Sierra Leone and why it wasn’t stopped in time — for the PBS Frontline episode Outbreak — received an Emmy nomination for outstanding research in 2016.

Fink’s first foray into television producing was as a co-creator and an executive producer of the Emmy-nominated documentary television series Pandemic: How to Prevent an Outbreak (2020). Filmed the year prior to the Covid-19 pandemic, it featured the intertwining stories of scientists and doctors around the world fighting to stop the next outbreak and warning that we were not prepared. Her first book, War Hospital: A True Story of Surgery and Survival, is about medical professionals under siege during the genocide in Srebrenica, Bosnia-Herzegovina.

Fink often lectures on topics ranging from emergency preparedness to journalism and is an adjunct associate professor at the Tulane School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine. She is at work on a book about the global Covid pandemic.