Peter Klein

Biography

Peter W. Klein is an Emmy Award-winning journalist and Director of the Graduate School of Journalism. Klein joined the faculty of UBC in 2005, and in 2008 he launched the International Reporting Program in which he takes students overseas to produce major works of global journalism. His 2010 class’ Frontline/WORLD documentary investigating the international electronic waste trade earned them the Emmy for Best Investigative Newsmagazine and the Society of Professional Journalist’s prestigious Sigma Delta Chi Award for Best Documentary. In 1999 Klein joined CBS News 60 Minutes as a producer. He continues to contribute to the venerable American news program, as well as to a variety of other broadcasts in Canada and the US. He has written for The New York Times, The Christian Science Monitor and many other publications. Klein is currently working on a book for St. Martin’s Press about the domestic war on terror in the United States, and he’s directing a feature-length documentary about global access to medicine. He began his career as a radio reporter for National Public Radio, covering the Bosnian war and the fall of communism in Eastern Europe. He went on to help found New York Times Television, a pioneer of small-format TV newsgathering. He was senior producer of I-Witness, an 18-hour documentary series for CBS in which videojournalists spent months in the field covering a single topic, and he went on to film, edit and produce his own news documentaries, spending as much as a year shadowing his subjects for ABC News Nightline specials. He is also the creator and executive producer of the Emmy-nominated History Channel (US) series Beyond Top Secret, which investigates clandestine operations around the world and has earned numerous Emmy nomination, as well as mentions in The New York Times and The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. From 2009-2010, he was the host of the national Canadian television program The Standard, in which he conducted interviews with newsmakers. In addition to his 2010 Emmy, Klein won on an Emmy for his 2000 60 Minutes investigation into the former Soviet Union’s smallpox weapons program, and shared an Emmy in 1996 for a documentary about global health. In 2003 he won a Rosalynn Carter Mental Health Journalism fellowship in Atlanta. Klein has previously taught at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism and New York University’s Department of Journalism. He has an MS from Columbia and a BA (honours) in Philosophy from Pennsylvania State University.

Research Interest

Rare diseases treatment, orphan drugs, rare diseases