Eileen McNamara was born in Cambridge, MA, on May 30, 1952. She was named a Boston Globe columnist last year after nearly 20 years as a reporter, covering everything from the night police beat to the United States Congress.

She has won many national public service awards, including citations by the Robert F. Kennedy Foundation and Sigma Delta Chi, for her reporting on conditions in the women's prison in Massachusetts, the racial disparity in Boston's infant mortality rates, the abusive treatment of battered women by state judges and the juvenile justice system's approach to teenage killers.

In 1987, McNamara was cited by Boston Magazine as The Best Reporter In Boston and by Esquire Magazine as one of the year's most promising young Americans.

McNamara is a lecturer in the journalism program at Brandeis University, where she teaches a course on Media & Public Policy. Her first book, on the malpractice case against Harvard psychiatrist Dr. Margaret Bean-Bayog, was nominated for an Edgar Award in 1995.

A graduate of Barnard College and the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University, she was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University in 1988.

She is married to Boston Globe sportswriter Peter May and is the mother of three young children.