Revelatory social justice reporting at
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Debbie Cenziper
Director of Medill Investigative Lab
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.
Copy editing provided by
Bernadette Kinlaw, Medill alum (1988)
Michael Sallah
MIL Media Fellow
Michael Sallah is a veteran reporter and editor. A Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author, he has worked on the investigations teams of The Washington Post, The Miami Herald and USA TODAY on stories ranging from public corruption and police abuses to international money laundering.
Matthew Orr
MIL multimedia adviser
and contributor
Matthew Orr is an assistant professor at Medill. He teaches video and broadcast production in Medill’s Washington, D.C., program. Orr is an award-winning reporter and filmmaker with nearly 20 years of experience in the field.
Elise De Los Santos
Medill Reports Publisher
Elise De Los Santos is a lecturer at Medill and the publisher of Medill Reports. She teaches undergraduate and graduate classes on reporting and writing. Prior to joining the faculty full-time in 2021, she worked in various editing roles at the Chicago Tribune.
If you are interested in advancing Medill’s work in investigative journalism, you can donate to the Medill Investigative Lab. Click on “Search School and Program Funds.” Search for “Medill Investigative Lab.”
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.