Our team

Reed Tuckson, M.D. is a physician with a long history of interest in advancing the health and wellbeing of children and the American people. Trained as a general internist, Dr. Tuckson’s experiences as the District of Columbia’s Commissioner of Public Health, the Senior Vice President of the March of Dimes Birth Defects Foundation, his participation on the Presidentially Appointed National Commission on Children, and his service on cabinet-level committees concerning infant mortality and the prevention of youth violence, developed in him a lifetime commitment to the wellbeing of children.

Dr. Tuckson is a recognized physician leader who has served as the Executive Vice President and Chief of Medical Affairs at UnitedHealth Group, and he actively serves on committees at the prestigious National Academy of Medicine and the National Institutes of Health. Among the organizations whose boards he currently serves are Project Sunshine, which provides supportive services to hospitalized children and their families, and The Arnold P. Gold Foundation, which is dedicated to advancing humanism in the practice of medicine.

Dr. Tuckson is proud to sponsor a health-related creative writing contest conducted through the Departments of English across Historical Black Colleges and Universities, and he is also the co-developer of the Urban Health Media Project, a youth journalism project conducted with journalism faculty at Howard University and Morgan State University.

Jayne O’Donnell is USA TODAY’s healthcare policy reporter. She focuses on the Affordable Care Act and other policies and programs that affect consumers’ health, insurance coverage and drug costs.

An author, TV contributor and freelance writer, Jayne has been published in Woman’s Day. Good Housekeeping and Parents and she has appeared on CNN, MSNBC, Good Morning America, CBS This Morning, NPR and C-Span. She has also won several public service and journalism awards for her work, most notably for her 1996 articles on the dangers air bags posed to children. That reporting prompted the government’s actions to make them safer, including the “smart” air bags and warning labels in every new vehicle.

Early in her career, Jayne worked for publications including Roll Call and the Washingtonian. She is a graduate of the University of Maryland College of Journalism and did graduate work at George Washington University’s business school.

Yanick Rice Lamb is an associate professor and chair of the Department of Media, Journalism and Film at Howard University. She teaches multimedia reporting, interactive editing and magazine publishing. She is also adviser to 101 Magazine, the Howard University News Service and TruthBeTold.news, a new fact-checking site and one of 11 projects under the 2015-16 Challenge Fund for Innovation in Journalism Education administered by the Online News Association.

Her research focuses on social media and technology, media management, entrepreneurship and diversity. It has been published in the Journal of Magazine and New Media Research, Asia-Pacific Media Educator, “Fight the Power! The Spike Lee Reader” and “Social Media: Pedagogy and Practice.” She also received an Industry Research Award from the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communications for research on tablet use by newspapers and magazines.

In addition to teaching, Lamb is a media consultant and co-founder of FierceforBlackWomen.com, honored with a 2015 Clarion Award from the Association for Women in Communication. Her work has also appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Essence, Parenting, Ebony, The History Channel Magazine, TheRoot.com and BlackAmericaWeb.com. Through an Association of Health Care Journalists fellowship, she spent a year investigating long-term care of the uninsured for the article “Stuck in the Hospital.” She recently received a Salute to Excellence Award in Digital Features from the National Association of Black Journalists for “Dealing With Dementia,” which she wrote as a John A. Hartford/MetLife Foundation Journalism in Aging & Health Fellow. She is featured in the Library of Congress as a History Maker in media and education.

At Heart & Soul, she served as editor-in-chief, editorial director, associate publisher and vice president, successfully relaunching the health magazine under three owners. As founding editor of BET Weekend, her editorial vision led to the magazine becoming the second-largest black publication, growing nearly 40 percent from 800,000 to 1.3 million in just three years. She spent a decade at the New York Times as assistant style editor, deputy home and living editor, assistant editor of Connecticut Weekly, metropolitan copy editor and layout editor on the news desk. She was also senior editor at Child magazine, copy editor at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, reporter at The Toledo Blade, editor-at-large at Essence magazine and contributing editor for Emerge.

She is co-author of “Born to Win: The Authorized Biography of Althea Gibson,” “Rise & Fly: Tall Tales and Mostly True Rules of Bid Whist” and “The Spirit of African Design.” She contributed to “Health & Healing for African-Americans,” “Aunties” and “Bet on Black: African-American Women Celebrate Fatherhood in the Age of Barack Obama.” “Nursing Wounds” is her forthcoming debut novel.

A native of Akron, Ohio, Lamb holds a bachelor’s in journalism from The Ohio State University and an MBA from Howard University, specializing in media management and marketing.

Jacqueline Jones, is a veteran journalist and journalism educator, who chairs Morgan State University’s School of Global Journalism & Communication’s Department of Multimedia Journalism. Jones is also deputy editor of the quarterly online magazine, Morgan Global Journalism Review, and writes and blogs for several online publications, including Convergence magazine. She has taught as a senior lecturer at Penn State University and as an adjunct journalism instructor at Howard University. Throughout her career, she has been a reporter, editor and manager. She has worked for the Detroit Free Press, New York Newsday, The Philadelphia Daily News, The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and The Washington Post.

A journalism graduate of George Washington University, she is a member and former national officer of the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ). She represents the NABJ on the Accrediting Council for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication.

Ingrid Sturgis, an associate professor specializing in new media in the Department of Media, Journalism and Film at Howard University, is “fully connected.” Firmly rooted in traditional as well as digital journalism, she has worked as a reporter and editor for the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Times-Herald Record, and the Poughkeepsie Journal as well as managing editor for magazine start-ups BET Weekend and Savoy. She has worked online as a senior programming manager for AOL’s Black Voices, and as editor-in-chief for Essence.com.

She is currently developing fully-connected.com, a mobile media project and newsletter that aims to curate news, information and resources covering the emergence of global Black talent in the digital era. She has also serves as a faculty adviser for Howard University’s fact-checking site truthbetold.news.

Ingrid is the author of the “The Nubian Wedding Book: Words and Rituals to Celebrate and Plan an African-American Wedding,” and the anthology “Are Traditional Media Dead: Can Journalism Survive in the Digital World.” Ingrid has a master’s in journalism from New York University, and a B.A. in art from City College of New York.

Hamil Harris, a lecturer in multimedia journalism at Morgan State University, came to the School of Global Journalism & Communication as an award-winning journalist who worked at The Washington Post from 1992-2016. He wrote hundreds of stories about the people, government, faith and the communities in the Washington area, as well as national topics including the Million Man March, Barack Obama’s presidential campaign, Hurricane Katrina, religion and health.

Harris has written for print and broadcast and in the last few years at The Post, he was a multi-platform reporter on the Local Desk of the Washington Post where he wrote, shot photos and produced videos for the news organization’s print and online editions.

In 2006 Harris was on the team of reporters that published the series “Being a Black Man.” He also was the reporter on the video project that accompanied the series that won two Emmy Awards, the Casey Medal and the Peabody Award. Harris is also a minister, a retired emergency medical technician; he plays guitar and speaks Russian.

Ron Taylor is a School of Global Journalism & Communication fellow at Morgan State University, where he mentors students in a variety of projects in the areas of sports, social justice, health and politics.

Taylor is a veteran journalist who has worked for a number of publications, including the Afro-American Newspapers Inc., Bloomberg, The Washington Post, Diverse Issues in Higher Education and the Atlanta Constitution. He attended Morehouse College and was a National Endowment for the Humanities fellow at the University of Michigan.

Taylor has covered health, the environment, tax policy and a variety of assignments before becoming a copy editor with a strong reputation for accuracy and precision. John Seidenberg, a former editor for BNA Bloomberg said of Taylor, “There is no more diligent or careful editor among the Daily Report for Executives copy editor’s group.”

Mike Tucker is a two-time winner of regional Emmy Awards for writing and producing. He creates distinctive print, broadcast, and online products through his company, Tucker Multimedia LLC, and teaches the Politics and Communications seminar in the Capitol Hill Internship Program.
He formerly taught journalism at Bowie State University and Howard University. He earned a Master of Arts from George Mason University and a Bachelor of Arts from Brooklyn College.

Tucker’s clients include AARP Bulletin, the American Advertising Federation, the Lott Carey Foreign Mission, and Reading Is Fundamental. He has reported and edited for the The Detroit News and USA Today and is a former press secretary in the U.S. Congress.

His broadcast credits include writing and co-producing “Shaw: The Place, The People, The Promise” and “Portraits of Freedom: A History of Black Washington.” Both documentaries aired on Washington’s WUSA-TV, where he was a producer-writer for talk and feature programming.

His teleplays “Eden’s Choice” and “Running Out of Time” garnered Emmys and another—”Jump-Start My Heart!”—was adapted from the poetry of Nikki Giovanni and aired on WHUT-TV in Washington.

Tucker’s stage plays include “Bought With a Price,” “Found in Space” and “Back to the Old Landmark,” which he co-wrote with his wife, Geri. The couple has one son, Christopher.

Jarrad Henderson is a two time Emmy-award nominated videographer, award-winning photographer, editor, and filmmaker, who is respected for working strategically and efficiently with creative teams or independently in deadline driven environments. An excellent student and teacher, who often is given the task of training peers and professional leadership teams, his work reflects that harmonious human relationships are the keys to success. His passion for storytelling soon earned him a staff position with the Detroit Free Press, Michigan’s largest media company, where Jarrad was named the 2014 Multimedia Photographer of the Year by the Michigan Press Photographer Association.

After briefly leaving Detroit to work as a Video Producer at Virginia Tech, Jarrad returned to journalism in 2016, accepting a position at USA Today, where he currently works as a Multimedia Producer. Recognized for being a forward-thinking, internet-savvy, digital media and video production expert, Henderson is working on becoming a feature filmmaker and volunteers his time to helping others pursue their dreams of becoming visual storytellers.