Stuart J. Sia, MS, MPH

Stuart J. Sia is a multi-platform journalist who is passionate about health, humanitarian and human rights stories. He speaks English, German, Setswana, some Afrikaans and Swahili, and is learning French, Portuguese, Spanish, and ASL. Sia has lived and worked abroad in Germany, Botswana, Liberia, and the Philippines. He is currently the emergency communications officer for International Medical Corps as a part of the Ebola response in Liberia. His work has appeared on CNN, NBC, CBS, BBC, the Guardian, Quartz, Buzzfeed, HuffPost Live, and Now This News.

Sia has an MS in broadcast journalism from Columbia Journalism School (2013), and an MPH in population & family health, concentration in sexuality & health, from Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health (2014).

Though he grew up in the greater Los Angeles area, Sia spent his senior year of high school in Weingarten, Germany as a Congress-Bundestag Youth Exchange Scholar. He returned to Los Angeles for college, graduating from UCLA with a bachelor’s in psychology and a minor in urban & regional studies.

Sia has over 8 years of experience in public health, most notably with International Medical Corps, Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontiéres, Planned Parenthood, and the NYC Mayor’s Office to Combat Domestic Violence. He served with the Peace Corps in Mogobane, Botswana, where he taught health education at the secondary school and worked with people with disabilities at the clinic. As a secondary project, Sia authored “There Is No Word For Grammar In Setswana,” a grammar book of the Setswana language. The book has been published by the Peace Corps, and continues to be used in the training of volunteers.