Indira Lakshmanan is senior executive editor for news and features at National Geographic Partners, overseeing reporting on animals and conservation, environmental threats and breakthroughs, history and contemporary culture, science and health, and travel and adventure.

For 25 years, Indira reported from 80 countries on six continents for The Boston Globe, Bloomberg News, and National Public Radio. She has interviewed and profiled leaders from Hillary Clinton to Fidel Castro, and covered crises from the fall of the Taliban in Afghanistan and the war in Bosnia to the SARS epidemic in China. She embedded with pirates in the Philippines, Maoist rebels in Nepal, and Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. Her reporting exposed child labor in Bolivian mines and illegal logging in Brazil’s Amazon; helped end the incarceration of innocent children in Nepal; and drew support for endangered cultures in southern China. She was later a Washington columnist for The Boston Globe and the International New York Times.

Before joining National Geographic, she was executive editor at the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, whose reporting projects won a Pulitzer Prize and numerous National Magazine Awards, Emmys, Peabodys, and George Polk Awards. She was the inaugural Newmark chair in journalism ethics at the Poynter Institute where she focused on building transparency and trust in media. In 2020, she was named the John S. Carroll Journalist of the Year. She started her career on NPR’s foreign desk, and has guest-hosted numerous NPR programs, including 1A, Here and Now, and Weekend Edition.