Louis Uchitelle, who covers economics for The New York Times, has written on a wide-range of subjects, including job and labor issues, national and international economic trends, corporate and labor economics, Administration economic policies, and the Federal Reserve System.

Previously, Mr. Uchitelle reported for The Times from Mexico and France.  He was named a senior writer in 1996 and was the lead writer that year for a series of articles entitled ``The Downsizing of America,'' which explored the layoff phenomenon then spreading across the United States. The seven-part series won a George Polk Award.

The layoff phenomenon and the damage layoffs do became the subject of a book that Mr. Uchitelle wrote entitled “The Disposable American: Layoffs and Their Consequences,” published by Knopf in 2006. While researching the book during a leave from The Times, Mr. Uchitelle was a visiting scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation in New York.

In 1992 and 1993, Mr. Uchitelle spent 20 weeks in Russia and the Ukraine reporting on the former Soviet Union's plunge into capitalism. From his Russian trips, he produced nearly 40 articles on many aspects of the transition to a market economy.
 
Before becoming an economics writer in 1987, Mr. Uchitelle was, for seven years, a senior editor in the Business News Department at The Times.

Mr. Uchitelle joined The Times in 1980 from The Associated Press, where he had been a reporter, editor, foreign correspondent in Latin America and a news executive.

From 1967 to 1973 he was bureau chief in Buenos Aires, Argentina, reporting such stories as the rise and fall of the Tupamaro urban guerrillas in neighboring Uruguay, the Argentine guerrilla movement, the numerous economic issues and trends in Latin America's southern cone countries, the return of Juan Domingo Peron and the election of a Peronist government in 1973. Later, back in New York, he served as business editor for three years, holding that post when he joined The Times.

From 1964 to 1967 he was the news agency's correspondent and bureau chief in San Juan, Puerto Rico, with responsibility for the Caribbean. His reporting included heavy emphasis on economics, at a time when the islands were trying to form an economic union. He played a lead role in AP's coverage of the U.S. military intervention in the Dominican Republic in 1965.

Mr. Uchitelle began in journalism as a general assignment reporter on The Mount Vernon (N.Y.) Daily Argus. He grew up in Great Neck, N.Y., and received a B.A. degree from the University of Michigan. For many years, he taught news and feature writing at Columbia University, a course he started at the general studies school in 1976.

Mr. Uchitelle and his wife, Joan, live in Scarsdale, N.Y. They have two married daughters, Isabel Finegold and Jennifer Weinberg, and three grandchildren.