Shannon Brownlee is an award-winning and internationally known essayist, writer, and speaker whose work has appeared in such outlets as the New York Times Sunday Magazine, TIME, the Atlantic, Slate, the Sunday Times of London, and the Washington Post. Her book Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine is Making Us Sicker and Poorer, which was published in 2007, was named the best economics book of the year by the New York Times and sparked a movement in healthcare and healthcare policy research. She was a Bernard L. Schwartz Fellow at the New America Foundation and served as acting director of the Health Policy Program before becoming senior vice president of the Lown Institute, a healthcare think tank in Boston. Brownlee is now the senior advisor to the president of the Lown Institute. She is a lecturer in the Department of Policy and Management at the George Washington School of Public Health and holds a masters degree in Marine Science from the University of California. She contributes regularly to the Washington Monthly but spends most of her time in her pottery studio.