Jane Gross

Ms. Gross' 29 year career at the New York Times gave her the opportunity to work side-by-side with a generation of journalistic giants and herself cover an array of historic events and social developments. Among them were the early days of the AIDs epidemic, the advent of crack cocaine, the explosion of autism, the last major earthquakes in both San Francisco and Los Angeles, the riots surrounding the Rodney King verdict, coverage of 911 (including a major role in the New York Times' prize winning "Portraits in Grief'') and also its award winning series "Children of the Shadows." These assignments led to a half dozen Pulitzer Prize nominations and other awards.

During her years writing about aging -- in the print edition of the paper, for her blog and her book --- all the nation's leading professionals in the field were Ms. Gross' trusted sources and she is frequently called upon to be the voice of the "real'' caregiver, not the credentialed or academic expert, at prestigious panels and forums sponsored by groups including the AARP Public Policy Institute, the Center for American Progress think tank, the New York State chapter of the Geriatric Care Managers Association and the Visiting Nurse Service of New York.

Early in her career, while covering sports, she was among a handful of women who were the first permitted in male locker rooms and profiled by Roger Angel in the New Yorker magazine, a piece later included in one of his famed anthologies. Her own assignments in those years included the famed Knicks basketball teams of the 1970s, the George Steinbrenner-Billy Martin-Reggie Jackson Yankees, great tennis rivalries including Jimmy Connors vs John McEnroe and Chris Evert vs Martina Navratilova and the emergence of Renee Richards (nee Richard Raskin) as a transsexual tennis player. Her late father, Milton Gross, was a nationally syndicated sports columnist for The New York Post so her childhood was spent at spring training, in press boxes, at major heavyweight boxing matches and in the unique milleu of bigtime sport in NYC in the 1950s and 1960s.