I've been a Washington Post data reporter since 2018, embedded on the investigations desk but working across the newsroom — national, metro and foreign.
I've investigated flaws in federal programs and the burdens residents endure from high parking and traffic tickets. I helped guide the creation of the Post's mass killings database, which tracks incidents in which four or more people are killed, not including the shooter.
With Jessica Contrera, Jenn Abelson, Carolyn Van Houten and a team of Post journalists, I reported "Abused by the Badge," an investigative series that exposed how hundreds of U.S. law enforcement officers have sexually abused children. The series prompted the Justice Department to issue new guidelines for the nation's 20,000 school police officers.
My work involves taking datasets, analyzing them and turning them into narratives that reveal the stories hidden deep in spreadsheets. My tools of choice are R, QGIS, OpenRefine and sometimes Python. With those I can clean, explore and visualize data. I'm also familiar with SQL and JavaScript.
I started at the Post in summer 2018 after leaving the Houston Chronicle, where I was part of the team recognized as a Pulitzer Prize finalist for its coverage of Hurricane Harvey.
In 2024 I was part of the Pulitzer Prize–winning team honored for what the committee described as a sobering examination of the AR-15 semi-automatic rifle — work that forced readers to reckon with the horrors wrought by the weapon so often used in mass shootings. I managed and analyzed the database tracking those events.
In addition to reporting, I teach journalism at UC Berkeley and I'm a senior fellow at USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, working with journalists in the university's data journalism fellowship.
