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Charles Ornstein is a senior reporter at ProPublica, a nonprofit news organization in New York. He is also a past president of the Association of Health Care Journalists. Prior to joining ProPublica in 2008, he was a member of the metro investigative projects team at the Los Angeles Times. In 2004, Ornstein and Tracy Weber were lead authors on a series on Martin Luther King Jr. /Drew Medical Center, a troubled hospital in South Los Angeles. The articles won the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service, the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award, and the Sigma Delta Chi Award for Public Service. In 2009, Ornstein co-authored a series of stories, also with Ms. Weber, which detailed serious failures in oversight by the California Board of Registered Nursing and nursing boards around the country. The work was a finalist for the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service. His most-recent project, Dollars for Docs, was awarded the 2010 Gannett Award for Innovation in Watchdog Journalism from Investigative Reporters & Editors. He previously worked at the Dallas Morning News, where he covered health care on the business desk and worked in the Washington bureau. Born in Detroit, Ornstein attended the University of Pennsylvania, majoring in history and psychology. In 1999-2000, he was a Media Fellow with the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, examining the future of the employer-sponsored health insurance system.
