Patricia Thomas

I'm a journalist and author who surprised herself by turning into a journalism professor.

I spent decades as a writer in San Francisco, Atlanta and Boston before joining the Grady College faculty in August 2005. I arrived in Athens the same weekend that the levees broke in New Orleans and floods devastated the Gulf Coast. I like to think that my long-term impact in Athens has been more positive.

When I was a journalism grad student at Stanford University, my goal was to write about the arts -- ideally for Rolling Stone. Perhaps this strikes a chord with some of you.

But reporting positions were scarce when I finished grad school and the first available job with decent pay and benefits was in an office at Stanford’s med school. There I met scientists doing research on every imaginable biological process and disease, and realized there were millions of stories to be told about the long path from discovery to the doctor’s office and the streets. That’s when I began specializing in science, health and medicine.

For my generation of specialized reporters, HIV/AIDS has been the biggest story of our careers. It gave us all a crash course in public health, driving home the point that the best way to manage a lethal disease is not to get it in the first place.

When the first reports of this bizarre, lethal syndrome began coming into the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, I was an Atlanta-based freelancer covering CDC for publications with physician readers. My first AIDS stories were published in 1983, when prevention was crucial because there were no treatments.

Years later, when effective medications were available for people who could afford them, there was still no vaccine to shield healthy people against infection. Driven by the desire to understand why this was so, I spent five years reporting and writing a nonfiction book called Big Shot: Passion, Politics and the Struggle for an AIDS Vaccine (PublicAffairs, 2001).

After the book came out, I was offered a visiting scholar position in the science and medical journalism graduate program at Boston University. This is where I discovered that teaching could be fun, on a good day, and that it was endlessly challenging.

After 20 (mostly) happy years in Boston, I was given the opportunity to launch a new graduate concentration in health and medical journalism here at Grady College. Graduate Newsroom is part of that effort, providing students with no previous training or experience a chance to learn the fundamentals of journalism.

My goal is for you to leave the course confident that you can research, report and produce accurate, fair and interesting stories on deadline.