Lehrman is an award-winning reporter on medicine, biotechnology and science policy. Her honors include a 2002 Peabody Award, Peabody/Robert Wood Johnson Award for Excellence in Health and Medical Programming, and Columbia/Du Pont Silver Baton (The DNA Files); the SPJ Wells Key (the Society of Professional Journalists’ highest honor); various other reporting and writing awards; and the John S. Knight Fellowship at Stanford University. Byline credits include Scientific American, Nature, Health, TheAtlantic.com, Natural Medicine, The Boston Globe, The New York Times, Salon.com, and The DNA Files, distributed by NPR.
She is author of “News in a New America,” a fresh take on developing an inclusive U.S. news media, and chapters for textbooks on covering the sciences. Currently she is co-editing Reporting Inequality: Tools and methods for covering race and ethnicity, with Venise Wagner of San Francisco State University, and working on Skin Deep: The Search for Race in Our Genes, about the quest to address health disparities, for Oxford University Press.
She has long been involved in evangelizing journalism values, ethics and diversity as a local and national leader in the Society of Professional Journalists and the SDX Foundation, and with other organizations such as the Maynard Institute for Journalism Education and the Center for Science and Justice at UC Santa Cruz.