ProPublica announced Friday that reporter Anna Maria Barry-Jester is joining the newsroom’s new global health team.

Barry-Jester comes to ProPublica from Kaiser Health News, where she has been a senior correspondent covering public health since 2018. Her series “Underfunded and Under Threat,” with colleagues at KHN and The Associated Press, investigated how chronically underfunded public health departments buckled under the strain of the coronavirus pandemic. The project won awards from the Online News Association and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Her reporting on harassment and menacing threats endured by public health officials was the basis of an episode of “This American Life,” and PEN America later awarded its PEN/Benenson Courage Award to the officials she profiled.

A multimedia journalist, Barry-Jester has lived and worked in Latin America and Southeast Asia, where she has reported, photographed and filmed stories in more than a dozen countries. Before Kaiser Health News, she was a writer at FiveThirtyEight and a producer at Univision and ABC News. She has a master’s degree in public health from Columbia University, where she focused on epidemiology and global health.

Barry-Jester is based in Northern California. She will start Aug. 1.