About Robin Herman

Robin grew up in the post WWII suburbs of Long Island. She was a member of the first class of women admitted to Princeton University in 1969. She joinedThe New York Times in 1973 as its first female sports reporter. In 1975 she crossed a line in pursuit of the same post-game player quotes that her male colleagues routinely obtained. At the National Hockey League’s All-Star game in Montreal, she became the first female reporter to enter a male professional sports locker room. She left sportswriting after five years to become a political reporter forTheTimes and then a health and medical writer forThe Washington Post. She has written a history of science book, Fusion:The Search for Endless Energy and lived in France for seven years. She is currently assistant dean for communications at Harvard School of Public Health.

Her college friend RK jokes that Robin’s eclectic career has been driven by perverse choice; that she did things for the pleasure of confounding people who expected she could not. (see ‘The Punch’ under story category: Sports)

She married the man who edited with special care a New York Times article she wrote about the counterculture 10 years after Woodstock. Their teenaged children, a boy and a girl, ask a lot of tough questions that their Mom answers in frank ways her own mother never had the freedom to.