Kat McGowan is a reporter and editor in the San Francisco Bay Area. She has covered health and biomedical research for decades, particularly the intersections between science, commerce, and ethics. Her stories include an investigation of a commercial breast cancer test provider for Mother Jones; an exploration of the misleading marketing of prenatal genetic tests for Quartz; an early look at flaws of the lab-based meat business for Neo.Life; and a feature about the intriguing science of young blood for Popular Science. After becoming a caregiver for several adult family members, McGowan recognized it was an essential public health issue, and in 2020 made it her beat. In 2022 she was awarded an Alicia Patterson Foundation fellowship to report on family caregiving. For NPR, she wrote about caring for long COVID and about the growing hospital-at-home movement. For the Boston Globe, McGowan explored new protections for LGBTQ + caregivers, and for Wired told a nuanced story about robots, dementia, and self-determination. She believes that caregiving is one of the most important and underreported news stories in the nation today. Previously, McGowan was an editor at Discover and at Psychology Today.