Dr. Sheri Fink is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, Emmy-nominated television producer, and the author of the New York Times bestselling book Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital. The book is a landmark investigation of patient deaths at a New Orleans hospital during Hurricane Katrina, and a suspenseful portrayal of the pursuit of justice and the slippery nature of truth.

After Katrina struck and the floodwaters rose, the hospital’s power failed and the heat climbed. As the situation deteriorated, exhausted caregivers chose to designate certain patients to rescue first—and others to rescue last. Months later, several health professionals faced criminal allegations that they deliberately injected numerous patients with drugs to hasten their deaths. Five Days at Memorial, the culmination of six years of reporting, unspools the mystery of what happened in those days, bringing the reader into a hospital fighting for its life and into a conversation about the most terrifying form of healthcare rationing. Five Days at Memorial is a staggering feat of investigative journalism that reads as compellingly as the best thrillers.

“[Fink] evenhandedly compels readers to consider larger questions, not just ethics but race, resources, history and what constitutes the greater good, while humanizing the countless smaller tragedies that make up the whole. And, crucially, she provides context, relating how other hospitals fared in similar situations.”

—Keir Graff, Booklist (starred review)

Named a Best Nonfiction Book of 2013 by The New York Times, Five Days also won the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Ridenhour Book Prize, and The Los Angeles Times Book Prize, among other honors. The book has been selected as a common read by campuses, medical schools and public health programs including Northeastern University and Grand Valley State University. Fink served as a producer on the limited series adaptation of Five Days on Apple TV+ from Oscar-winner John Ridley and Emmy-winner Carlton Cuse. Writing at RogerEbert.com, Brian Tallerico described the series as “some of the most harrowing and well-made television of the year.… The kind of show that takes history from the page and brings it to life, honoring both the dead and the people traumatized by Mother Nature and bureaucratic incompetence.”

“A triumph of journalism…. Fink recreates this world with mastery and sensitivity, revealing the full humanity of each character…. Fink’s narrative wades through the muck and finds only real people making tough choices under circumstances the rest of us, if we’re lucky, will never experience.”

—The Houston Chronicle

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. Her story “The Deadly Choices at Memorial,” co-published by ProPublica and The New York Times Magazine, received a 2010 Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting and a National Magazine Award.

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. Fink’s first book, War Hospital: A True Story of Surgery and Survival, follows medical professionals under siege during the genocide in Srebrenica, Bosnia and Herzegovina.

In her reporting, Fink continues to uncover the human response to global crises for The New York Times and ProPublica: from the devastating effects Hurricanes Harvey and Irma, to mass shootings, and medical conditions related to migrants at the United States southwestern border. A former relief worker in disaster and conflict zones, she received her MD and PhD in neuroscience from Stanford University.

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 currently at work on a book about the scientific, political, social, and ethical dimensions of the pandemic as it sickened millions and created chaos in countries around the world.