Gardiner Harris is a San Diego writer who spent more than three decades as a daily journalist roaming from the hollows of Eastern Kentucky to the mangrove forests of Bangladesh and to the corridors of power at the White House. In every place, he spurred profound changes in law, lifestyle and outlook.
As a cop reporter at The Louisville Courier-Journal, Harris’s investigations unlocked a secret rape case against a police officer and led to criminal charges against the chief of police and resignations among senior officers. Under surveillance by the department’s secretive intelligence unit, Harris was sent to Hazard, Ky. As the Eastern Kentucky bureau chief, Harris uncovered a nearly universal conspiracy in the region’s coal industry to cheat tests of coal mine air quality, exposing thousands of miners to deadly peril. Among the cheats was a mining operation owned by Paul E. Patton, Kentucky’s governor at the time. The series led the Kentucky Legislature to pass a broad overhaul of coal mine safety laws and the U.S. Mine Safety and Health Administration to revamp regulations. His life was repeatedly threatened.
 Harris became a pharmaceutical reporter at The Wall Street Journal, where his investigation of Bristol-Myers Squibb led to criminal charges against three top executives and the dismissal of its chief executive. He became the public health reporter for The New York Times, where his investigations led to the withdrawals of a multi-billion-dollar diabetes medicine and dozens of popular pediatric cough-and-cold drugs. His stories exposing secret payments from drug makers to prominent academics led to the passage of the Physician Payments Sunshine Act requiring pharmaceutical and medical device companies to report payments to physicians and teaching hospitals.

In 2012, Harris moved to New Delhi to become the Times’s South Asia correspondent. His series exposing India’s appalling levels of air pollution led to wholesale changes in law and lifestyles across the continent. His stories on India’s terrible sanitation and its effects on infant stunting led to a conclave at the United Nations General Assembly and the construction of more than 100 million toilets. His life was repeatedly threatened, and the Indian government revoked his press pass, a first for a Times correspondent.

In 2015, Harris returned to Washington DC to become a Times White House correspondent and then a Times diplomatic correspondent. He left daily journalism in 2019 to write “No More Tears.” Harris collected numerous awards for his journalism, including a George Polk Award, and he was part of teams that won a Pulitzer Prize and was a Pulitzer finalist