Shannon Brownlee is a freelance investigative journalist based in Washington, D.C.
Brownlee is the author of the groundbreaking book Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine is Making Us Sicker and Poorer, which was named the best economics book of 2007 by the New York Times and helped spark a growing movement to address overtreatment in clinical medicine.
From 2013 to 2021 she served as Senior Vice President of the Lown Institute, a non-partisan, public policy thinktank and civic enterprise based in Boston, MA. Before that she was a senior fellow and acting director of health policy at the New America Foundation, a non-partisan thinktank in Washington, DC.
Brownlee has won numerous journalism awards, spent a decade as a senior editor at US News and World Report and was named one of “four writers who changed the world” by the World Congress of Science Journalists. She is the author of multiple peer-reviewed papers in medical journals and has published numerous articles and essays in such outlets as The Atlantic, New York Times Magazine, Times of London, The BMJ and Health Affairs. She has served as an editor of the “Less is More” section of JAMA Internal Medicine and lecturer at the Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice.
Brownlee holds a master’s degree in marine science from the University of California, Santa Cruz.