Lara Salahi is an award-winning journalist, author, and Distinguished Professor of Journalism at Endicott College. In 2025, she was named Journalism Educator of the Year by the New England Newspaper & Press Association.  

She has worked across every major medium -- from local and network television to international print and documentary film, -- with her reporting appearing in outlets around the world. A respected field producer, she has covered major stories across New England for news networks including ABC News. 
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Lara has reported on nearly every major public health epidemic in recent history through multiple formats. She is the executive producer of Track the Vax, a podcast hosted by Everyday Health and MedPage Today focused on the COVID-19 vaccines. The series breaks down the process and science behind the largest mass vaccination program in U.S. history.  

Her book, Outbreak Culture, examines each phase of the 2014-16 Ebola epidemic -- the largest and deadliest Ebola outbreak to date -- and identifies the factors that complicated the response to the crisis. Through original research, critical interviews and shoe leather reporting, the book exposes a fractured system of global outbreak response and lays out guiding principles to shift the culture among international responders. 
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Lara was part of the team at the Boston Globe and its news site Boston.com awarded the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for exhaustive and empathetic breaking news coverage of the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings and the ensuing manhunt. 

Lara is the founder of Salahi Media, a multi-platform media production company dedicated to sharing stories on public health, science and medicine, through diverse experiences and compelling narratives. 

A highly recognized journalism scholar, Lara studies business models to sustain local news. She and her research team coined the term, "news-academic partnerships," which is now regularly used to describe an innovative collaborative model of journalism between news outlets and academic institutions. In her latest book, News-Academic Partnerships, Salahi shows how these collaborations emerged as a strategic response to the collapse of community news ecosystems. She argues that news–academic partnerships are more than temporary fixes. They are transformative experiments with the potential to revitalize community-centered journalism, strengthen democracy, and empower the next generation of storytellers.
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Lara received a dual undergraduate degree from Boston University in Broadcast Journalism and International Relations with a concentration in Middle East and North African foreign policy and security studies, along with a minor in French. She has a master's degree in Health Communication from Emerson College and a doctorate in Education from Regis College with a concentration in teaching and learning.

Lara travels extensively and is fluent in Armenian, Arabic, and French. She began her career as an on-air reporter.