I am a journalist from Chicago. My work often examines the intersections between community self-determination, public health and safety, and the state.
I’m currently the state investigations editor at the Illinois Answers Project. I have also led news and investigative teams as a contributing editor at South Side Weekly, The TRiiBE and the Chicago Reader. My freelance reporting has appeared in The Appeal, Block Club Chicago, In These Times, Scientific American, Slate, Smithsonian Magazine, The Trace, WIRED and elsewhere.
I studied ecology and evolutionary biology in college. After a few years working in life-sciences labs, I began my journalism career writing for research and popular science publications. I found, perhaps unexpectedly, that scientific inquiry and investigative reporting use many of the same tools to make sense of the world. Both test hypotheses, gather evidence and analyze data, and both require curiosity, rigorous empiricism, patience, and the drive to keep trying new angles when answers are difficult to find. And both try to arm people with the truth so that they can improve their world.
I started reporting on Chicago news and politics a year before the 2020 George Floyd protests rocked the city. They led me to my first award-winning investigation: an exposé of how the Chicago police used the city’s gun-violence prevention center to monitor activists. Since then, I have been writing and editing enterprise news stories and investigations. I often examine the impacts of violence, law enforcement and incarceration on Chicago’s communities. My background in life sciences leads me to consider violence and solutions to it with a public health perspective. My reporting ethics lead me to center communities’ self-determination and residents’ voices, and seek to minimize harm to the people we serve with the stories we tell.
Awards
2024 Sarah Brown Boyden Award winner, technology reporting, with Max Blaisdell: Missed Shots (South Side Weekly)
2024 Online Journalism Awards finalist, technology reporting, with Max Blaisdell: Missed Shots (South Side Weekly)
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