Laurie Garrett was born in Los Angeles in 1951. She was educated at Merrill College and at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she graduted in 1975 with a BA in biology. She attended the University of California, Berkley, for her graduate studies where she studied in the Department of Bacteriology and Immunology. Garrett began reporting about science news on KPFA radio. She later went on to become a journalist at Newsday.

Laurie Garrett is a Pulitzer prize winning science journalist and public health and policy advocate. She has written extensively on global health systems, chronic and infectious diseases, and bioterrorism. Garrett is a former Senior Fellow for the Global Health Program at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). She has authored several books, including the best-selling The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance, 2000. Garrett is the only journalist to be awarded the Peabody, the Polk, and the Pulitzer. She has been a featured speaker at many international meetings and has given several commencement speeches at many prestigious universities.