Susan Phillips is a senior reporter/editor, covering climate, energy, and environment as part of the WHYY News Climate Desk. She is a founding member of the award-winning StateImpact Pennsylvania website and a member of NPR’s energy and environment coverage team. She has worked as a reporter for WHYY since 2004, covering politics, immigration, criminal justice, and education.
She received a 2013 Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Journalism Award for her work covering natural gas drilling in Pennsylvania. She directed and produced an award-winning series on gun violence in 2007 called “Life Stories.” In 2010 she traveled to Haiti to cover the earthquake and produced an award-winning series on Pennsylvania’s gas rush called “The Shale Game.” She’s also won the Associated Press Sandy Starobin Award for uncovering threats to drinking water related to gas drilling. She has received ten Edward R. Murrow awards and was a finalist for an Online News Association Award in 2015. She spent a year at MIT studying climate change as a Knight Science Journalism Fellow.
Susan studied environmental science as a Metcalf Fellow and an MBL Logan Science Journalism Fellow. In addition to several trips to Haiti, her reporting has taken her to Japan, Costa Rica, France, Guatemala, Cuba, and Morocco, where she reported on the 2016 climate talks as an International Reporting Project Fellow. She earned her M.S. in journalism from Columbia University in 2003.