I'm a watchdog reporter for the Southern California News Group, which serves Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside and San Bernardino Counties. I'm passionate about journalism with impact.
I'm a public records hound, and won an Associated Press Media Editors Association First Amendment Award after obtaining 5,000 essays written by middle school students to vet (and ultimately disprove) their school district's claim that giving students Holocaust denial literature labeled "credible sources" didn't lead to students denying the Holocaust.
I'm a data-driven reporter (and constantly working to level up my data journalism skills) and have used public records and assembled data sets to look at teen suicide in two major projects. The first looked at which districts have the fewest students contemplating suicide, as determined by anonymous self-reported data from students, and then looked at what those districts were doing right to support student mental health. The second used five years of coroners data from four counties to determine how suicides by minors changed during pandemic-era distance learning. I used a similar data-driven approach to identify which California school districts appear to be the best at preventing bullying and broke down what they were doing right as a template for other districts to emulate.
In addition to my work in California, I've worked for three newspapers in Virginia and freelanced in Egypt. I've also talked to Adam West on the Batphone, rode in the Ecto-1 and came in second place in the Mexican National Chili Cook-Off.
