2024 Dao Prize for Excellence in Local Journalism

Lauren Caruba is an award-winning journalist and investigative reporter for The Dallas Morning News, where she focuses on long-term projects and accountability reporting. She previously was a staff writer from 2016 through 2021 for the San Antonio Express-News, where she covered investigations, health & medicine and education.

Lauren’s work includes extensive coverage of COVID-19’s impact on San Antonio, starting in February 2020 with the federal quarantines of evacuees from Wuhan and two cruise ships at Lackland Air Force Base. As the virus began spreading in the community, she shifted her focus to the hospital workers, patients and families whose lives were fundamentally altered by the pandemic. She spent hours shadowing doctors and nurses in COVID-19 wards and emergency rooms as they coped with surges. Her work also explored a one man’s harrowing double lung transplant after COVID destroyed his lungs at age 34, how the pandemic complicated end-of-life decisions and contributed to health care worker burnout, the yearlong recovery of an uninsured nurse who fell critically ill himself, and the role of ECMO life support for some the sickest patients.

Lauren’s body of work on COVID garnered her numerous accolades, including recognition as a 2021 local reporting finalist in the prestigious Livingston Awards for Young Journalists. In the statewide Texas APME contest, she won 1st place in Specialty Reporting and 2nd place in Star Reporter of the Year. Her story, “Night Shift: 18 hours inside a COVID-19 ICU,” will also appear in the 2022 anthology, Best American Newspaper Narratives, Vol. 9, published by the University of North Texas Press and the Mayborn Graduate Institute of Journalism.

Her earlier work in San Antonio included a yearlong series documenting the lives of transgender San Antonians and the divisive debate in the Texas Legislature over the “bathroom bill,” for which she was selected as a 2018 finalist in the Livingston Awards.