Sharon Lerner is a reporter at ProPublica, which she joined in 2022 after working for seven years as an investigative reporter at The Intercept. Lerner covers health and the environment and focuses on environmental injustices, pesticides and air pollution, among other issues.

Lerner has reported extensively on PFAS, a family of manmade compounds linked to cancer, low-birthweight, immune dysfunction and other harms. She broke the news that firefighting foam used by the military contained was a source of widespread PFAS pollution and that GenX, a PFAS compound that DuPont created to replace the cancer-causing compound PFOA, also causes cancer.

Lerner has received 11 awards from the Society of Environmental Journalists and the Newswomen’s Club of New York named her its journalist of the year in 2021.