Erin Schumaker is a writer and editor based in Brooklyn, New York. She’s currently a reporter at POLITICO, where she writes about the future of health.


She previously served as Business Insider's science editor, where her team covered space, climate, extreme weather and discoveries. Prior to that, she spent a decade as a health reporter. She covered the Covid-19 pandemic for ABC News, including the trends driving infections and the struggles of safety-net hospitals. She was also an enterprise reporter at HuffPost, where she covered the opioid crisis and gun violence as public health challenges.

Her freelance work has appeared in The Guardian, The Trace, New York Daily News, Adirondack Life and other publications.

In 2017, she was awarded an American Association for Cancer Research June L. Biedler Prize for her story, "Finding A Cure Wouldn’t Mean We’ve Defeated Cancer."


Survival is also more complicated than being cancer-free, a concern that’s rarely included in well-meaning, but oversimplified political initiatives and awareness months.
Damon Dahlen /HuffPost

Damon Dahlen /HuffPost


Erin has a master’s from Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism and is a graduate of Union College, where she won a grant to document recently deported migrants' detention stories on the U.S.-Mexico border.