For 19 years, Chris Bowman has covered California and the American West as an environmental reporter for The Sacramento Bee.

Several of his stories have spurred reforms in environmental policy and enforcement. Most recently, his December 2004 expose on unabated pollution from the world's largest cheese plant led to a record-high penalty and overhaul of California's policing of water quality.

Bowman is perhaps best known for his reporting on naturally occurring asbestos in the fast-growing foothill communities of the Sierra Nevada, east of Sacramento. His investigation, now in its eighth year, has found construction unearthing a particularly toxic form of the minerals and releasing its fibers into the neighborhood air.

In 1998, Bowman took a three-month leave to help journalists in Zimbabwe develop environmental reporting under a Senator John Heinz Fellowship with the International Center for Journalists. He helped reporters draw connections between the country's environmental and human impoverishment and its historic policies of "ecological apartheid" that segregated the rural masses onto poor land.

Bowman also is the first U.S. journalist to be appointed Environmental Nieman Fellow at Harvard, awarded for the 1994-95 academic year.

He has won national journalism awards, beginning with his exposés on bridge safety for The Hartford Courant. His career began as courthouse reporter in Riverside, California for The Press-Enterprise, where his protests over closure of pre-trial hearings in death penalty cases resulted in two U.S. Supreme Court cases upholding press freedom.

Bowman holds a master's degree in journalism from Columbia University, and an undergraduate degree in history from the University of California, Davis.