Ted Alcorn is the policy director for Vital City, and his journalism on health and justice has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, and Bloomberg Businessweek, among other publications. His 2022 series Blind Drunk, on New Mexico's worst-in-the-nation crisis of alcohol deaths, prompted legislative change and won awards from the Association of Health Care Journalists and the Institute for Nonprofit News. He began his reporting career while living in Beijing as a Henry Luce Scholar.
Previously he was a policy advisor in the administration of New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and the founding research director of Everytown for Gun Safety. He earned graduate degrees from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and the School of Advanced International Studies, and completed the Lede Program in data journalism at Columbia Journalism School.
He also teaches courses on gun violence, criminal justice, and policy research at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health and NYU's Wagner School of Public Service.