I’m Keren Landman. Since 2015, I’ve been covering consumer health, doctor culture, outbreaks, health policy, and other intersections of medicine and society, both as an independent journalist and as a staff reporter at Vox. Before that, I studied to be a physician-scientist. I did residency training in internal medicine and pediatrics at the University of Rochester and specialty training in infectious diseases at Beth Israel Deaconess Hospital in Boston, and did clinical research on the prevention and treatment of HIV and malaria in resource-poor countries. I also trained as a “disease detective” in the Epidemic Intelligence Service at the CDC. I completed a journalism fellowship at the University of Toronto.

I was initially drawn to medicine by the promise of being able to take care of people; to clinical research by the spirit of collaborative inquiry; to public health by the potential to make positive change for lots of people, all at once. I did good work in those fields, but there was always some friction between my values and what the work demanded. I don’t feel that in journalism.

This work does not enforce a hierarchy, rewards getting it right over doing it fast, and lets me be curious at different interesting people every day. It gives me permission to be funny, and a way to turn my own complaints into something useful.

Landmansplained is where complexity meets plain language — and where I get to interrogate dogma, insist on clarity, and make something that helps people understand the world and each other.

I write it from my home in Atlanta, occasionally from under a dog.