Iris Adler is a 2021 Fellow at the Shorenstein Barone Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy at the Harvard University Kennedy School.
She is a former reporter, News Director and Executive Director for Programming and Podcasts at WBUR Radio in Boston. In these roles she has reported widely on Boston and New England, overseen the station’s news coverage, special projects and national and local programs. Most recently she created WBUR’s Innovation Lab where she oversaw new programming initiatives, including all of the station’s original podcasts and wbur.org’s opinion site Cognoscenti.
She also worked as the Executive Editor at NECN, a regional television news channel covering the six New England states, where she developed a nationally recognized documentary unit. She was the producer and reporter on a range of documentaries, from the Seeds of Peace Camp in Maine where Arab and Israeli children live together, to a series of documentaries on the men and women who returned from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars with PTSD and brain injuries.
Over the course of her career, she has won every major regional and national award for her work in both television and radio, including the Edward R. Murrow award, the Alfred I. Dupont award, and several Emmys. Iris has been married to Sherman for thirty-six years.