Millions of breathing machines. One dangerous defect.

In 2023, students in the Medill Investigative Lab partnered with ProPublica and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette to investigate the massive recall of millions of breathing machines built by Philips Respironics and sold around the world. 

 


FINALIST FOR
THE SCRIPPS HOWARD JOURNALISM AWARD
FOR EXCELLENCE IN BUSINESS/FINANCIAL REPORTING

Read the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette announcement here

 

WINNER OF THE
2023 GEORGE POLK AWARD
FOR MEDICAL REPORTING

Read the ProPublica announcement here

 

MIL students at the 2023 George Polk Awards.

WINNER OF THE 2023 AWARD FOR
EXCELLENCE IN HEALTH CARE JOURNALISM,
BUSINESS REPORTING

Read the announcement here

 

FINALIST FOR THE 
2023 HARVARD UNIVERSITY GOLDSMITH PRIZE
FOR INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALISM

Read the ProPublica announcement here

 

MIL students at the 2023 Goldsmith Awards.

FIRST PLACE IN INVESTIGATIVE REPORTING
KEYSTONE MEDIA AWARDS,
PENNSYLVANIA PRESS ASSOCIATION


FIRST PLACE FOR
GENERAL FEATURE/ “LONG-FORM STORYTELLING AT ITS FINEST”
SOCIETY FOR FEATURES JOURNALISM

 

Medill Investigative Lab
Revelatory Social Justice Reporting
A team of student journalists from the Medill Investigative Lab interview a family in Indian Country devastated by opioid abuse. Students tracked the use and abuse of pain pills in the Pacific Northwest and efforts by Native American tribes to combat overdose deaths.

Our Mission: The Medill Investigative Lab probes power brokers and programs that promise to provide a safety net to tens of millions of vulnerable Americans. Through real-time, on-the-ground reporting in Chicago and beyond, students learn to think, research and write like an investigative reporter, producing groundbreaking social justice stories from the ground up.

Our Team
: Undergraduate and graduate students at Medill apply to take part in the lab and spend two terms — one in Evanston or Chicago and one in Washington, D.C. — working side-by-side with veteran journalists on an investigation of national or international importance. Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter Debbie Cenziper, a writer at ProPublica and director of investigative journalism at Medill, oversees the lab. Students at MIL have worked on investigations that have received a series of national journalism awards, including the George Polk Award and the Overseas Press Club Malcolm Forbes Award for best international business news reporting.

Our Classes
: The lab complements a lineup of undergraduate and graduate classes at Medill that include Introduction to Investigative Reporting, Local Reporting, Multi-Media Storytelling, Magazine Reporting and Data Journalism. Medill’s classes are taught by top professors who are experts in their fields.

Fall 2022
Shadow Diplomats
WINNER OF THE 2023 OVERSEAS PRESS CLUB MALCOLM FORBES AWARD FOR BEST INTERNATIONAL BUSINESS NEWS REPORTING
HARVARD UNIVERSITY GOLDSMITH PRIZE FOR INVESTIGATIVE REPORTING 2023 SEMI-FINALIST
 
Summer 2022
Black Lung
finalist for the Golden Quill Awards
given out by the Press Club of Western Pennsylvania
Read the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette story here
Spring 2022
Secret Money in America
2021 stories
The lasting impact of Trump-era immigration policies
2020 stories
The coronavirus in America's nursing homes
Additional stories in 2020

The Strong People: A Native American tribe fights opioid abuse
Hear from our graduates

"My year with Medill has changed my life in ways I didn’t think were possible when I finished my undergraduate degree and felt like my options were limited. It all started because of a program that challenged me and peers and professors who believed in the work I could produce."

Haajrah Gilani

MIL Class of 2023

Sidnee King

MIL Class of 2020

"Working on the project was truly the most valuable reporting experience I have ever had. I learned and grew more than I could ever have imagined, both as a journalist and as a person. I felt genuinely moved by many of the stories I was able to tell; some of them even impacted the ways I think about my own life. I will remember them for a long time."

Cadence Quaranta

MIL Class of 2021

MIL students report at a drug-testing lab in Denver.

MIL students report in Panama in 2022.

Debbie Cenziper

Debbie Cenziper is an associate professor and the director of investigative reporting at Medill. She also oversees the Medill Investigative Lab. Besides teaching, Cenziper is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter and nonfiction author who writes for The Washington Post. She spent three years at The George Washington University before joining the faculty of Medill.

Over the years, Cenziper’s investigative stories have exposed wrongdoing, prompted Congressional hearings and led to changes in federal and local laws. In her classes at Medill, Cenziper and her students focus on social justice investigative reporting.

Cenziper has won dozens of awards in American print journalism, including the Robert F. Kennedy Award for reporting about human rights and the Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting from Harvard University. She received the Pulitzer Prize in 2007 at The Miami Herald for a series of stories about corrupt affordable housing developers who were stealing from the poor. A year before that, she was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for stories about dangerous breakdowns in the nation’s hurricane-tracking system.

Cenziper is a frequent speaker at universities, writing conferences and book events. Her first book, “Love Wins: The Lovers and Lawyers Who Fought the Landmark Case for Marriage Equality,” (William Morrow, 2016) was named one of the most notable books of the year by The Washington Post. Her second book, “Citizen 865: The Hunt for Hitler’s Hidden Soldiers in America,” was released by Hachette Books in November 2019.

Cenziper is based on Medill’s Washington, D.C. campus, working with undergraduate and graduate students on investigative stories.