Laurel Wamsley
Laurel Wamsley is a reporter for NPR's News Desk. She reports breaking news for NPR's digital coverage, newscasts, and news magazines, as well as occasional features. She was also the lead reporter for NPR's coverage of the 2019 Women's World Cup in France.
Wamsley got her start at NPR as an intern for Weekend Edition Saturday in January 2007 and stayed on as a production assistant for NPR's flagship news programs, before joining the Washington Desk for the 2008 election.
She then left NPR, doing freelance writing and editing in Austin, Texas, and then working in various marketing roles for technology companies in Austin and Chicago.
In November 2015, Wamsley returned to NPR as an associate producer for the National Desk, where she covered stories including Hurricane Matthew in coastal Georgia. She became a Newsdesk reporter in March 2017, and has since covered subjects including climate change, possibilities for social networks beyond Facebook, the sex lives of Neanderthals, and joke theft.
In 2010, Wamsley was a Journalism and Women Symposium Fellow and participated in the German-American Fulbright Commission's Berlin Capital Program, and was a 2016 Voqal Foundation Fellow. She will spend two months reporting from Germany as a 2019 Arthur F. Burns Fellow, a program of the International Center for Journalists.
Wamsley earned a B.A. with highest honors from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she was a Morehead-Cain Scholar. Wamsley holds a master's degree from Ohio University, where she was a Public Media Fellow and worked at NPR Member station WOUB. A native of Athens, Ohio, she now lives and bikes in Washington, DC.
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After a relentless assault by Russian forces, Ukraine appears close to defeat in Mariupol. Why is the city so important? The reasons range from geographic and strategic to economic and psychological. -
The arbitration demand provides the fullest accounting yet of the accidental shooting of cinematographer Halyna Hutchins from Baldwin's perspective.
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"We see a really clear association between how these maps were drawn in the '30s and the air pollution disparities today," says an author of a study on the effects of the discriminatory policy. -
An expedition went where few have ever gone to locate the remnants of a ship that became trapped in the ice 106 years ago, dashing the famed explorer's ambitious mission to cross Antarctica. -
Astronauts hammered collection tubes into the lunar surface on the last Apollo mission to the moon. Now a sample is being carefully pierced open — to be analyzed by today's latest tech. -
As the idea spread, more than 61,000 nights were booked, grossing nearly $2 million. One host in Kyiv says the donations have helped pay staffers who have fled and buy food for elderly neighbors. -
The embrace of Ukrainians fleeing the Russian invasion is far different from the cold shoulder refugees from the Middle East and Africa have received. -
Russia's action was universally condemned in an emergency U.N. Security Council meeting, which concluded with no action taken. -
Flores' lawsuit alleging racial discrimination by the NFL will continue, his attorneys say. In Pittsburgh, Flores will join a staff led by the NFL's only Black head coach, Mike Tomlin. -
The former Minnesota officer was convicted of manslaughter after she apparently mistook her gun for her Taser when she fatally shot the 20-year-old Black man. She will serve 16 months in prison.
