Melissa Suran is a senior staff writer for the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA). Before joining JAMA, Suran was a senior science writer for the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, where she also hosted and produced episodes of the journal's Science Sessions podcast.
Since 2009, Suran has been a U.S. correspondent for the European Molecular Biology Organization’s peer-reviewed journal EMBO Reports, formerly published by the internationally recognized Nature Publishing Group. Her work has appeared in four books and in several publications, including National Geographic, Kaiser Health News, Crain's Chicago Business, and the Chicago Sun-Times. She has been featured in Time Out Chicago for her work at WLUW-FM as the host and producer of the Full on Friday show. Suran's broadcast experience in Chicago includes work with PBS’s Chicago Tonight, and Keep Hope Alive on WVON-AM.
Suran holds a Ph.D. in journalism from The University of Texas at Austin. She has presented her research at the McCombs Healthcare Initiative Symposium as well as the annual conferences of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC), the International Communication Association, and the National Communication Association. Suran's peer-reviewed work has appeared in several journals, including the American Journal of Infection Control, Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, and the Journal of Contemporary Eastern Asia. Her first-author study on how Reddit users covered the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing was published in Journalism Studies and won a first-place paper award at the 2015 AEJMC conference in San Francisco.
Before earning a Master of Science degree from Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, Suran received bachelor degrees in journalism and fine arts/photography as well as a minor in classical studies from Loyola University Chicago, where she graduated Magna Cum Laude.
