Lauren is The GroundTruth Project's inaugural Middle East correspondent, based in Istanbul. Previously, she was a columnist for Foreign Policy magazine. She’s the co-founder of Foreign Policy Interrupted, a start-up incubator and fellowship program dedicated to changing the ratio and getting more women miked and bylined. She's also the co-founder of SchoolCycle, a United Nations Foundation initiative to provide bikes to girls in Malawi so they can get to school more quickly and safely.
She was a 2010-2011 Fulbright fellow in Egypt, where she is the founding assistant editor of a new journal, the Cairo Review. A Pulitzer Center grantee, her ongoing reporting project “Egypt: The Country Outside the Square” is funded by the center. She was a 2012 Overseas Press Club fellow in Jerusalem with the Associated Press, and a 2013 UN Foundation Press fellow.
A finalist for a 2012 Livingston Award, she’s reported from Egypt, Tunisia, Bahrain, Syria, the U.A.E., Israel, Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Jordan, Zambia, Malawi, and Nigeria. She graduated summa cum laude from New York University in May 2009 as a John W. Withers Memorial Award recipient and Presidential Scholar, with a degree in Media, Culture, and Communication. She received Chicago’s Association for Women Journalists 2010 award for outstanding young female journalist and received her master’s degree from Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism in June 2010.
Originally for the 'burbs of Philadelphia (#Wawa), she has a nerdy obsession with all things stationery (and peanut butter) and is usually downright amazed by everything she learns from the extraordinary and resilient people she gets to meet for a living.
