Patti Wolter

Patti Wolter joined the Medill faculty in the spring of 2002. She was named the Helen Gurley Brown Magazine Professor in 2018 and a Charles Deering McCormick Distinguished Clinical Professor in 2020. Prior to joining the faculty, she spent a dozen years in senior staff magazine jobs in New York, San Francisco and Chicago. She served as managing editor as well as acting editor at Mother Jones magazine and oversaw the award-winning health investigations team at Self magazine. She also worked as the managing editor and editor-in-chief of The Neighborhood Works, a non-profit magazine that covered community organizing and public affairs. Her freelance writing on women’s health and nutrition has appeared in a range of publications since joining the Medill faculty, and she has served as an editorial consultant for a variety of media outlets.

Wolter’s teaching focuses on the magazine industry, fact-checking, science writing and narrative, especially in relationship to feature writing and multimedia storytelling. She teaches courses in magazine editing, feature writing, health and science reporting, and narrative structure for undergraduate and graduate students. Wolter regularly partners with consumer media in her classes, and students in her courses have placed their reporting in a wide range of national media outlets. She has also co-taught Medill’s investigative journalism course, taught advanced science writing to master’s students, and worked with Medill's Knight Lab instructors integrating digital storytelling with narrative feature writing.

Since 2015, Wolter has been involved in transforming writing instruction for STEM PhD. students. Wolter was part of the team that developed a writing-for-consumer-audiences class for STEM+ Ph.D. students, eventually taking the lead instructor role. Recognizing the growing need for comprehensive Ph.D. training in communicating science to the public, Wolter developed an opportunity to give STEM Ph.D. students credentialed access to more journalism training. In the Fall of 2022, she implemented the Medill Media and Science Communication program, a first-of-its-kind partnership between The Graduate School and the Medill School for STEM Ph.D.s to earn a three-course cluster or five-course certificate in science writing.

In addition to her regular teaching, Wolter has designed and implemented fact-checking curricula across Medill classes and programs and regularly guest lectures on the topic. She has played a lead role in curriculum work and teaching innovation across the journalism school. She is also a regular guest lecturer across campus on communicating STEM topics to public audiences.

In May 2019, Wolter spearheaded a team of students to create the first edition of California Sunday’s Pop-Up Zine show, bringing the acclaimed national live journalism program to its first-ever college campus. She is a regular judge for the National Magazine Awards and served as a member of the Knight Foundation’s Science Journalism Project. She also leads Medill’s prestigious John Bartlow Martin Award for Public Interest Magazine Journalism annual contest. She has received numerous teaching awards from Northwestern’s Associated Student Government and was Medill’s Undergraduate Professor of the Year in 2017.