Spring 2020 MIL Team

LaTesha Harris

LaTesha Harris is a fourth-year student at Northwestern University; she is a Master of Science Journalism candidate, having previously completed her Bachelor of Science in Journalism and Creative Writing. Harris currently serves as an investigative reporter for the Medill News Service, covering a variety of topics such as cannabis justice in Chicago and COVID-19. Before, Harris worked as an editorial intern with Variety magazine in Los Angeles, reporting at red carpet premieres and gallery openings. Read her work here and here

Joel Jacobs

** MIL Data Specialist

Joel Jacobs is a data journalist and graduate student at Northwestern University, specializing in Social Justice and Investigative Reporting. He graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, in 2017 with a major in computer science and a minor in Global Poverty and Practice. Jacobs then worked as a software engineer at Google in New York before starting at Northwestern in the fall of 2019.
 
Jacobs regularly utilizes large datasets in his work, which focuses on corporate and government accountability. He built a database to analyze hundreds of thousands of health deficiencies reported at nursing homes nationwide for an investigative piece in the Washington Post. He also helps manage a list of nursing homes in the U.S. that have reported coronavirus cases. In addition, Jacobs has covered local and state government issues in Chicago and Illinois, including tax increment financing, prison gerrymandering and ward redistricting.
Sidnee King

Sidnee King is a graduate journalism student at Northwestern University specializing in social justice and investigative reporting. As a reporter for Medill News Service, King’s work has a particular focus on affordable housing, development, and minority communities. She spent several months covering African-American communities on Chicago’s South Side and the development of the Obama Presidential Center. King studied broadcast journalism at Howard University in Washington, D.C. where she worked as a multimedia reporter covering local politics for the Howard University News Service, the Baltimore Afro-American, and the Michigan Chronicle. View here work here and here

Alexa Mikhail

Alexa Mikhail is a junior at Northwestern University, studying journalism with a minor in Gender and Sexuality Studies. She is a producer, reporter and anchor for the Northwestern News Network, where she has covered LGBTQ+ homelessness in Chicago and the democratic primary debates in Illinois’ Third District. Alexa also has international reporting experience. She traveled to Havana, Cuba and reported on the taxi system and tourism. Alexa worked as a production intern for ABC News’ Good Morning America this past summer, where she worked with producers on health pieces and wrote for their digital platform. She is also a recent member of the Medill Investigative Lab. You can find some of her work here

Arnab Mondal

Arnab Mondal is a graduate student studying journalism at Northwestern University. Mondal is in the Social Justice and Investigative specialization. Mondal is originally from Kolkata, India, where he worked as newspaper reporter at the daily Eastern Chronicle where he focused on political and communal conflicts, before joining Northwestern University. At Northwestern’s Medill school of journalism Mondal has mainly focused on criminal justice and hate crimes. As a part of the Medill Investigative Lab, Mondal was part of a team that reported investigative stories for The Washington Post. You can view his work here.

Shawn Mulcahy

Shawn Mulcahy is a reporter and graduate student at the Medill School of Journalism. He has written about Illinois’ efforts to expand voting access in jails for The Washington Post, and covers marijuana industry lobbying and regulation for Cannabis Wire. Mulcahy previously worked at WFSU Public Media in Tallahassee, Florida, where he covered state government and anchored afternoon newscasts. His work has won a handful of accolades, including a regional Edward R. Murrow award for excellence in writing. A graduate of Florida State University, Mulcahy was born and raised in Tampa. View his work here.

Dan Rosenzweig-Ziff

Dan Rosenzweig-Ziff is a junior at Northwestern University, studying journalism with a double major in international studies. He has served as a writer, section editor and senior editor at the student magazine, North by Northwestern. Dan has worked for the Medill News Service as a congressional reporter examining environmental issues and the New York Daily News covering politics and social media. While studying in Jordan, he worked with a New York Times stringer reporting on financial issues faced by rural Jordanian women and as a translator for the Arabic news outlet Radio al-Balad. Dan also knows Spanish, Arabic and Hebrew, and has just started to learn German, languages which he intends to use in future reporting. Read some of his work here

Areeba Shah

Areeba Shah is a graduate student at Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism pursuing a MSJ with a focus in Social Justice and Investigative Reporting. Shah traveled to South Carolina for a week, covering the 2020 democratic presidential primaries for Medill Reports. In the past, she served as the Editor-in-Chief of her college newspaper, the Independent Collegian, and worked as a reporting intern for The Blade. She’s interested in writing about criminal justice, mass incarceration and immigration. View her work here

Copy Editor: Bernadette Kinlaw, Medill alum (1988)

Medill Reports Fellow: Rikki Li 

Graphic Designer: Worth Chollar

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.