William Wan, T. Anthony Pollner Professor, Fall 2024
Email: William.Wan@washpost.com
William Wan is an enterprise reporter at The Washington Post. He has spent his career writing about people suffering on the margins of society. As a religion reporter he documented discrimination against Muslim soldiers in the U.S. Army and was part of a Pulitzer finalist team unearthing the roots of a mass shooter’s anger. As a foreign correspondent in Beijing, he risked arrest to write narratives about those suffering at the hands of their government.
As a health reporter, he produced policy-changing, data-driven investigations on America’s emerging mental health crisis. He showed the pandemic was suddenly causing thousands more deaths among dementia patients. The head of the American Association of Suicidology forwarded his story on pandemic teen suicides to the Biden administration, calling it “a must read.” The National Council for Behavioral Health called his findings on soaring overdoses “truly disturbing," and the CDC confirmed those findings six months later. His relentless coverage contributed to Congress passing an unprecedented $4.25 billion for mental health – the largest amount ever.
In his current job, he used hundreds of thousands of Maryland hospital records to show the number of mentally ill children languishing in ERs had soared, even as state leaders vowed they were fixing the problem. He exposed how students at Yale – one of America’s richest institutions – were hiding their mental health problems because of Yale’s practice of exiling them and forcing them to reapply for admission. The investigation led to congressional scrutiny, a class-action lawsuit and sweeping changes.