Mandy Erickson is the director of editorial development. She oversees the writing team; edits the News Center; and covers sports medicine, nephrology, nutrition and surgery. She received her bachelor’s degree in English from the University of California, Berkeley, and a master’s from UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism. She was a staff reporter and copy editor for an East Bay newspaper before moving to Wired magazine, where she led the copy desk. For two decades she was a freelance writer and editor, much of it in the health care realm, though she also reviewed restaurants for the San Francisco Chronicle, cowrote a cookbook, authored a how-to book about starting a laundromat and covered the Archdiocese of San Francisco for the National Catholic Reporter, among other gigs. She joined Stanford Medicine’s Office of Communications in 2019. A lifelong Bay Area resident, she likes to garden, play tennis and hike with her pug mix.