Gardiner Harris is the public health reporter forThe New York Times. Before working at the Times, he worked at The Wall Street Journal and lived for four years in Hazard, Kentucky, as the Eastern Kentucky bureau chief for The Louisville, Kentucky Courier-Journal. His reporting in Kentucky led to broad changes in laws governing coal-mine safety and black-lung compensation, and it earned him national journalism awards, including a George Polk Award and the Worth Bingham Prize for investigative journalism. As a child, he and his brothers spent summers cutting and hanging tobacco on his family's farm in Todd County, Kentucky.