California Data Fellows
Aura Bogado is a senior reporter and producer for Reveal. Her impact-driven work covers immigration, with a focus on migrant children in federal custody. She's earned a Murrow Award, a Hillman Prize, and an IRE medal, and was a finalist for the National Magazine Award and an Emmy nominee. She was previously a staff writer at Grist, where she wrote about the intersection of race and the environment, and also worked for Colorlines and The Nation. She's a graduate of Yale University. Bogado’s project will tackle data about migrant children confined during the early days of Biden’s administration.
Kristi Coale is a freelance reporter and producer for print, online and radio who covers homelessness and housing, health, environmental issues and government at all levels. Her work has appeared in many publications, including The Frisc, The San Francisco Public Press, Bay Nature and Wired, and her radio pieces have aired on Making Contact and public radio station KALW. She earned a bachelor’s degree from UC Berkeley. Her project will examine how well San Francisco's 3-year-old "Coordinated Entry" program for the homeless is working.
Will Huntsberry is an investigative reporter with Voice of San Diego. In 2019, he exposed a California doctor who had written hundreds of vaccine exemptions to school children for reasons outside of accepted medical science. That project led to a new state law that closed loopholes for vaccine exemptions, and the local chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists awarded him its annual community impact award. Will was previously a producer and Kroc fellow at National Public Radio and worked at an alt-weekly in North Carolina. He earned a master’s degree in journalism from Columbia Journalism School and a bachelor’s degree in English literature from North Carolina State University. His project will focus on the disparate suicide rates in different communities.
Adam Mahoney is a reporter who focuses on environmental justice and investigations at the nonprofit climate magazine Grist. Before joining Grist, he reported on police and prisons for the Chicago Reporter, Chicago Sun-Times, Injustice Watch and The Guardian. His work has also been featured in Rolling Stone, Mother Jones, Slate and Atmos Magazine. He has received awards from the Chicago Headline Club and the Society of Professional Journalists and was an Emerging Reporter Fellow at ProPublica in 2020. He received his bachelor of science. degree from Northwestern University, where he studied journalism and sociology. Adam's project will focus on governmental regulation and public health impacts of oil refineries on his hometown, Wilmington, California, known as the fossil fuels capital of the West Coast.
Jade Martinez-Pogue is a general assignment reporter for Noozhawk, Santa Barbara County’s online-only news outlet. She primarily covers county government, the coronavirus pandemic and education. She has freelanced for Coastal View News in Carpinteria and interned at the Pacific Coast Business Times. Jade received a bachelor’s degree in communication and a journalism certificate from UC Santa Barbara in 2020. During her undergraduate years, she was on the editorial board of the university’s student-run newspaper, The Bottom Line, where she worked as the national beat reporter. For her project, she will identify gaps in Santa Barbara County’s mental health services, their consequences, and what can be done to remedy them.
Holly J. McDede is a reporter, editor and producer at KQED radio in San Francisco. She received a 2020 Center for Health Journalism Impact Fund for a project focused on high school students who turned to social media to bring attention to sexual assaults on campus. Before joining KQED, she was the justice reporter at KALW public radio, where she also taught high school students on reporting and narrative storytelling. She received a bachelor’s degree in literature and creative writing from the University of East Anglia. Her project will use data to dig deeper into the drug overdose epidemic in San Francisco and the racial disparities involved in overdose deaths.
Edwin Rios is an award-winning reporter at Mother Jones, covering education and the news of the day. He joined Mother Jones almost seven years ago. In January, he was one of 55 writers of color chosen to join the first class of Periplus Collective Fellows, a mentorship program to support U.S. writers who are people of color. As part of the fellowship, he worked with Jonathan Blitzer, staff writer at the New Yorker, and also contributed to a project for the New York Times Magazine. Before that, he reported for The Oregonian for a year and was a reporter-researcher at Vanity Fair. He earned a bachelor’s degree in journalism from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University and during college had internships with Fast Company, Vanity Fair and the New York Daily News. His project will examine evictions in California and elsewhere following the end to the eviction moratorium.
Chloe Lee Rowlands is a data journalist at Bay City News Foundation who helps bring stories to life with visualizations, multimedia presentations and digital packages. As web manager of LocalNewsMatters.org, she oversees the presentation of all content on this nonprofit public service site and coordinates related social media for @baynewsmatters. Since 2020, she has also created several Info Hubs to help readers filter relevant information on COVID-19, wildfires and library resources. She also has led a team of reporters using data to report on and create visualizations to show trends throughout the Bay Area related to health, equity and demographics. She graduated from Quest University in Canada in 2020 with a degree in science communication. For her Data Fellowship project, she will produce a series of data-informed stories and interactive data visualizations that explore the expected growth in the senior population in the next two decades and the resulting resource and infrastructure needs of seniors across the 12 counties in the Bay Area.
Beth Thornton started in radio as a freelancer for KCBX Central Coast Public Radio in 2019. Initially, her interviews with media literacy educators were broadcast on Issues & Ideas, a showfeaturing local voices on topics of interest to the community. She has since expanded her reporting to include health, environment, and art.Beth graduated from UC Santa Barbara with a bachelor’s degree in Liberal Studies. She wrote for the campus newspaper and later earned a certificate in creative writing from UCLA Extension Writers’ Program. In addition to freelance work, her career has included management positions in communications. Beth’s Data Fellowship project will assess health care readiness for an aging population by examining the current health care environment and projected needs for the Central Coast.
Beau Yarbrough has been a watchdog and education reporter for the Southern California News Group since 2012. SCNG publishes 11 Los Angeles-area daily newspapers, including the Orange County Register, Los Angeles Daily News and the Press-Enterprise. A graduate of Virginia Tech, Beau has written for newspapers in Virginia, Egypt and California. He's won local, regional and national awards for his reporting. He was a 2020 Center for Health Journalism California Fellow. For his Data Fellowship project, Beau will identify California school districts with the lowest levels of anonymous reports of bullying. He'll then look at what those districts have in common -- with a goal of helping other school districts replicate successful programs.
National Data Fellows
Emily Bader is the health and enterprise reporter for the Sun Journal in Lewiston, Maine. Since joining the Sun Journal in April, she has been the lead reporter on COVID-19 in Androscoggin, Franklin and Oxford counties. Prior to that, she was a staff writer at The Forecaster/Lakes Region Weekly, covering nine towns in the greater Portland area. She graduated from Wellesley College in 2018 with a degree in international relations–history. Emily grew up in the San Fernando Valley and now lives in Portland, Maine. As a 2021 Data Fellow, she will produce a multi-part project on the intersection of the opioid, child welfare and COVID-19 crises in central and western Maine.
Caitlin Cruz is a senior news reporter for Jezebel. As a journalist and editor, she specializes in reported features and analysis about reproductive rights, gender, politics and power. She also fact-checks for print and digital publications. Based in Houston, Caitlin was a founding member of Snapchat’s Happening Now, a breaking news product; an interim editor at The Texas Observer; an editor and reporter for Fusion; a blogger for Talking Points Memo; and an investigative fellow at The Seattle Times. Caitlin is a proud member of the Writers Guild of America, East and the Freelance Solidarity Project at the National Writers Union. She graduated with concurrent bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University. She will be reporting on the caregiving crisis in Texas during the coronavirus pandemic.
Daniel Gonzalez has covered race, equity, immigration, the U.S.-Mexico border and minority communities for The Arizona Republic/USA Today Network since 2000. He has reported extensively along the border and from the interior of Mexico. He has also reported from Guatemala, Puerto Rico, Germany, Spain, Italy and Northern Ireland. He has received numerous local and national journalism awards. He was a lead reporter and writer for The Wall, a multi-media series awarded the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting. He was also co-lead writer for the Arizona Republic’s “Pipeline of Children” series, which received the 2014 Hillman Prize and the 2014 Ancil Payne Award for Ethics in Journalism from the University of Oregon. He is a two-time Arizona Virg Hill Journalist of the Year. In 2014, he was a finalist for the American Society of News Editors Award for Distinguished Writing on Diversity. In October 2014, he spoke at the United Nations for the inaugural World Cities Day. Daniel previously worked for newspapers in New York, Massachusetts and Illinois. He has taught newswriting and ethics and diversity courses at Arizona State University's Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communications. He has a journalism degree from the University of Iowa and studied Spanish literature at the graduate level at Syracuse University. His project will explore how the COVID-19 pandemic disproportionately disrupted the learning of Latino students, who make up a large and fast- growing part of the student population in Arizona and other Western states.
Kyeland Jackson is a data reporter for Report For America, covering racial disparities in Minnesota with Twin Cities PBS. He holds a bachelor’s and master's degree in communications from the University of Louisville and has won awards from theKentucky Associated Press Broadcasters as well as the Louisville Society of Professional Journalists. Kyeland was selected for the Ida B. Wells Society for Investigative Reporter’s Data Institute in 2018 and the Third Coast Radio Residency in 2019. Raised in Elizabethtown, Kentucky, he worked as an associate producer at Louisville, Kentucky’s NPR-affiliate before starting with Report for America. He was also the editor-in-chief of The Louisville Cardinal, a weekly independent newspaper at his alma mater. His Data Fellowship project will investigate a long-standing Medicaid program that may be erasing intergenerational wealth opportunities for Black and Indigenous families.
Jenna Kunze is a staff reporter at Indian Country Media, where she covers stories impacting Indigenous people across the United States and Canada. Previously, she reported in Alaska for two years, with a broad focus on climate change, Indigenous people and violence against Native women. As a 2019 Pulitzer Center grantee, Jenna traveled to the Alaska Arctic to cover Iñupiat adaptability and resilience in the face of an ever-changing environment, reporting that was named “Best Environmental Reporting” by the Alaska Press Club in 2020. In addition, she collaborated on a podcast that was named “Best Audio Reporting” in the 2021 Covering Climate Now Journalism Awards presented by Columbia Journalism Review and NBC's Al Roker. For her Data Fellowship project, she plans to collect data through community-participatory research on one tribe’s measurable intergenerational health impacts resulting from the U.S. government’s assimilation policies at Indian Boarding Schools.
Stephanie Lamm is a data reporter working on the investigative team at the Houston Chronicle. Her first investigative project there focused on the state’s largest mental health provider — county jails. More recently, she has been part of a team chronicling the state’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Stephanie’s work has received awards from the Dallas Press Club, the Texas Associated Press Managing Editors and the Society for the Advancement of Business Editing and Writing. She previously worked as a data reporter for The Dallas Morning News. She has degrees in political science and journalism from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. For their joint project, Stephanie will collaborate with Alex Stuckey to identify and quantify the problems plaguing Texas's youth psychiatric hospitals.
Justin Murphy is an education reporter at the Democrat and Chronicle in Rochester, New York. He joined the paper in 2012 and before that was a reporter for The Citizen in Auburn, New York. He attended the University of Chicago and the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University. His project will show the health and health equity consequences of the uneven distribution of the tree canopy in Rochester, New York.
Liz Owens is the senior investigative reporter at WRDW/WAGT in Augusta, Georgia. She has nearly 20 years of experience working in local broadcast news. She is a recipient of a regional and two national Edward R. Murrow Awards and a regional Emmy. She has won more than a dozen Associated Press and GABBY awards throughout her career. She has a track record for holding the powerful accountable, exposing government corruption and uncovering disparities in local communities. She is a document nerd and lover of data. Her project will focus on the pandemic's impact on educational equality among students in the Augusta-Richmond School District, which is 75% Black, highlighting students most negatively affected.
Alex Stuckey is an investigative reporter for the Houston Chronicle. While working for The Salt Lake Tribune, she won a Pulitzer Prize in 2017 for a project examining the rampant mishandling of sexual assault reports at Utah colleges. She came to the Chronicle shortly thereafter to write about NASA, science and the environment. She has also won an Investigative Reporters and Editors award, a Sigma Delta Chi Award for Excellence in Public Service Journalism, a Frank A. Blethen Award for Local Accountability Reporting and a Society of Professional Journalists Don Baker Investigative Reporting Award and was a Livingston Award finalist. An Ohio native, Alex has lived in five states since graduating from Ohio University’s E.W. Scripps School of Journalism in 2012. For their joint project, Alex will collaborate with Stephanie Lamm to identify and quantify the problems plaguing Texas's youth psychiatric hospitals.
Elizabeth Thompson is a Report for America corps member reporting on gender and prison health for North Carolina Health News, a nonprofit news organization in Chapel Hill. She has covered Texas politics for The Dallas Morning News’ Washington bureau, reporting on Texans in Congress and the 2020 election, for which the politics team won an honorable mention from Texas Associated Press Managing Editors. She was previously a freelance journalist for The Raleigh News & Observer, covering North Carolina politics. She is a classically trained opera singer. She is a native Long Islander and became a Tar Heel when she studied journalism and music at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her project will focus on COVID-19 and North Carolina’s juvenile justice system.
William Wan is an enterprise reporter focused on long-form stories at The Washington Post and was The Post’s national health reporter during the early days of the pandemic. During 16 years with the Post, he has reported from more than 20 countries, covering national security, the Obama presidency, mass shootings and disasters, foreign policy and religion. As The Post's China correspondent, he uncovered corruption in the judicial system and human rights abuses. His coverage of mental health during the pandemic contributed to government action and an unprecedented increase in federal funding. He has won awards for his coverage of religion, China and health. He was part of the 2010 Pulitzer Prize finalist team that covered the Fort Hood shooting. Before joining The Post, he worked as a reporter for the Los Angeles Times and the Baltimore Sun. He has a bachelor’s degree in English literature from the University of Chicago and a master’s degree in journalism from the University of Maryland. For his Data Fellowship project, he will examine the worsening problem of suicide in America and the deep disparities in our health care system when it comes to mental illness compared to physical ailments.