Patricia Guthrie, MA

Patricia Guthrie is Dr. Robert Guthrie's daughter and one of the special guest speakers at this year's Symposium. As a newspaper reporter, she focused on public health, chronic diseases, and social issues surrounding healthcare. She received numerous national awards, including the George Polk Award for Local Reporting for a series she co-wrote for The Albuquerque Tribune in 1988 on chronic alcoholism in Gallup, N.M. In 1999, she was named a Kiplinger Fellow at The Ohio State University, where she earned a master's degree in journalism. Four years later, she was selected for the prestigious Harvard Nieman Fellowship for Journalism. One of her primary pursuits in recent years is memorialiing and celebrating her father's contributions to newborn screening and the treatment of metabolic disorders. She’s spoken at numerous meetings— National Alliance for PKU, Paul M. Fernhoff Memorial Lecture, Association for Public Health Laboratories, Dr. Harvey Levy Program Inaugural Symposium, European Society for PKU and Allied Disorders, the Senate of the Republic of Mexico, and contributed articles to several international PKU publications. In 2014 she wrote and narrated a video for the March of Dimes to celebrate their newly created “Dr. Robert Guthrie Newborn Screening Quality Award” (Robert Guthrie Award - YouTube), shown at annual conferences. In 2016 — on the 100th anniversary of her father’s birth — she founded “The Robert Guthrie Legacy Project” (www.robertguthriepku.org) to help document and promote Dr. Guthrie's legacy to the broader community. Patricia Guthrie is Dr. Robert Guthrie's daughter and one of the special guest speakers at this year's Symposium. She is an independent journalist from Seattle, Washington, specializing in writing about public health, chronic diseases, and social issues surrounding healthcare. Her writing has frequently appeared in the Huffington Post, Bloomberg News, the Canadian Medical Association Journal, and the Nursing Association Journal. She has received multiple awards for her work on these subjects, including the Don Bolles Award and the Scripps-Howard Award. In 1988, she received the George Polk Award for Local Reporting for a series she co-wrote for the Albuquerque Tribune on chronic alcoholism in Gallup, NM. She was also a Kiplinger Fellow at The Ohio State University, where she earned a master's degree in journalism. She has made it one of her primary goals to memorialize and celebrate her father's contributions to newborn screening and treating metabolic disorders. As part of these efforts, she has founded the The Robert Guthrie Legacy Project in 2016 to help document and promote Dr. Guthrie's legacy to the broader community.