JoNel Aleccia


JoNel Aleccia is a Senior Correspondent focused on aging and end-of-life issues on the KHN enterprise team. Before joining KHN in November 2016, she was a health reporter for more than a decade, covering regional and national news at outlets including The Seattle Times, NBCNews.com, TODAY.com and MSNBC.com. Before that, she was a reporter, editor and columnist at newspapers in the Northwest. JoNel was a member of reporting teams that won National Press Club Awards for digital journalism focused on the Great Recession and on amputees in the 2010 earthquake in Haiti.

From this contributor

Explore more from The Transmitter

Map of socioeconomic opportunity in the United States next to visualizations of functional connectivity and structure in sensory and motor cortices.

IQ’s link to brain structure, function in children may be a mirage

A child’s socioeconomic status, screen time and amount of sleep all show stronger associations with measures of brain structure and function, according to an imaging study of nearly 12,000 9- to 10-year-olds.

By Natalia Mesa
11 June 2026 | 5 min read
Photo collage of Tempest McDonald.

When autistic kids grow up, Chapter 2: “You need to go to college”

With just a high school equivalency degree and struggling as a single mother, Tempest McDonald is forced to shift her priorities.

By Brady Huggett
11 June 2026 | 28 min listen
Research image of X-linked RNAs in male mice.

Noncoding RNA sways core autism traits in mice

Small deletions in an X-linked RNA alter social and repetitive behaviors in male mice without broadly affecting learning or memory.

By Giorgia Guglielmi
11 June 2026 | 4 min read