Victoria St. Martin
Health and Environmental Justice Reporter
Health and Environmental Justice Reporter
Victoria St. Martin covers health and environmental justice at Inside Climate News. During a 20-year career in journalism, she has worked in a half-dozen newsrooms, including The Washington Post, where she served as a breaking news and general assignment reporter. Besides The Post, St. Martin has also worked at The Star-Ledger of Newark, N.J., The Times-Picayune of New Orleans, The Trentonian, The South Bend Tribune and WNIT, the PBS-member station serving north central Indiana. In addition to her newsroom experience, St. Martin also is a journalism educator who spent four years as a distinguished visiting journalist with the Gallivan Program in Journalism, Ethics, and Democracy at the University of Notre Dame. She currently teaches at the Klein College of Media and Communication at Temple University. St. Martin is a graduate of Rutgers University and holds a master’s degree from American University’s School of Communication. She was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2011 and has written extensively about the prevalence of breast cancer in young women. In her work, St. Martin is particularly interested in health care disparities affecting Black women. Her project for the 2023 National Fellowship explores how lax regulation of the cosmetics industry harms Black Americans.
A reporter asks why cosmetics in the U.S. are loaded with chemicals banned in other countries — and whether toxic exposures caused her breast cancer.