April 26, 2021

Deborah Balthazar named inaugural NYU recipient of Anne O’Hare McCormick Memorial Fund Scholarship

Incoming NYU journalism student Deborah Balthazar has been named the inaugural NYU recipient of the Anne O’Hare McCormick Memorial Fund Scholarship. The $3,000 award is given in honor of Fund board member emerita Elizabeth “Betsy” Wade, the first woman to edit news copy at the New York Times and the lead plaintiff in a landmark 1974 sex discrimination lawsuit against the newspaper. Wade died in December at 91.

Balthazar, 25, is a 2017 cum laude graduate of Caldwell University, where she majored in biology and completed all of her pre-med coursework. She got interested in science journalism after being awarded a summer fellowship at the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University. For the past two years, Balthazar has reported for a local journalism site in her hometown of West Orange, New Jersey, while also working as a substitute science teacher in the public schools. In September, she will begin her master’s studies in the Science, Health and Environmental Reporting Program (SHERP) at NYU.

“Deborah Balthazar has the potential to be an extraordinary journalist in the years ahead. The Anne O’Hare McCormick Memorial Fund Scholarship helps make it possible for the next generation of outstanding journalists to build their knowledge and skills,” said Stephen D. Solomon, director of the Arthur L. Carter Institute of Journalism at NYU. Added SHERP director Dan Fagin, “we’re thrilled to have Debbie as a student, and very grateful to the McCormick Fund for its vote of confidence in her and in the future of our profession.”

The scholarship is the first the Anne O’Hare McCormick Memorial Fund plans to award through its new partnership with the Carter Institute. A longtime foreign news correspondent and columnist for the New York Times, McCormick was the first woman to receive a Pulitzer Prize for foreign correspondence, in 1937, and the first woman to serve on the Times editorial board.