UNC alumna shares Pulitzer for NYT's Ebola coverage

UNC Hussman School of Journalism and Media alumna Helene Cooper was part of a New York Times team that was awarded the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting for its coverage of the Ebola epidemic in West Africa.

To convey the scale of the Ebola epidemic — the worst in history, which claimed more than 10,000 lives — The Times mobilized dozens of reporters, photographers, video journalists and others over the year to produce more than 400 articles, including about 50 front-page articles from inside the Ebola-afflicted countries.

Cooper, a Pentagon correspondent and former White House correspondent for the Times, covered the outbreak in her native Liberia.

View the Times' coverage of the Ebola epidemic.

Prior to covering the Pentagon and the White House, Cooper was The Times's diplomatic correspondent. She joined the newspaper in 2004 as the assistant editorial page editor, a position she held for two years. She has reported from 64 countries, from Pakistan to the Congo.

Watch Cooper's 2010 commencement address to UNC journalism graduates.

Watch a 2012 conversation between Cooper and Dean Susan King.

Previously, Cooper worked for 12 years at The Wall Street Journal, where she was a foreign correspondent, reporter and editor, working in the London, Washington and Atlanta bureaus. She is the winner of the Raymond Clapper award for Washington reporting (2000), the Sandy Hume award for best reporter under the age of 35 (2001), the Missouri Lifestyle award for feature writing (2002), a National Association of Black Journalists award for feature writing (2004), and the Urbino Press Award for foreign reporting (2011).

Born in Monrovia, Liberia, she is the author of "The House at Sugar Beach: In Search of a Lost African Childhood," a New York Times best seller and a National Books Critics Circle finalist in autobiography in 2009.