Pooja Salhotra joined the Tribune in 2022 as its first-ever East Texas reporter. Based in Lufkin, she covers a vast region that borders three states and stretches north to Texarkana and south to Beaumont. Pooja was born and raised in the Houston area and graduated from Yale University. She also...

Aaron Mendelson is a reporter who joined the Center for Public Integrity in June 2022, covering threats to multiracial democracy. Previously Mendelson worked as a data and investigative reporter at Los Angeles NPR affiliate KPCC, where his work included an investigation into a massive empire of slum housing, a troubled...

Sarah Shemkus is a longtime journalist who covers business, technology, sustainability, and the places they all meet. She has covered the workings of small-town government in New Hampshire, the doings of alleged swindlers and con men, and the minutiae of local food systems. Her work has appeared in the Guardian,...

Kari Lydersen is a Chicago-based reporter, author and journalism instructor. She is a lecturer in the graduate program at the Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications at Northwestern University, where she leads the Social Justice & Investigative Specialization and is co-director of the Social Justice News Nexus, a...

Yvette is a senior reporter at the Center for Public Integrity covering inequality in economic and social well-being. Most recently she worked as an environmental justice reporter for Grist & HuffPost, and as an investigative reporter for ThinkProgress in Washington D.C. She reports at the intersection of justice and equity,...

Nicole Santa Cruz is a reporter covering issues of inequality in the Southwest. She joined ProPublica from the Los Angeles Times, where she spent nearly 12 years as a staff writer. As lead reporter on the Times’ Homicide Report, a groundbreaking public service project that documents every homicide victim in...

Ayden Runnels is a reporting fellow based in Denton, Texas. Ayden was born in the Houston suburb of Clear Lake and speaks English and Arabic. They serve as editor-in-chief of the North Texas Daily, the University of North Texas' student-run newspaper, and have worked on freelance projects for Newsweek and...

Sally Howard is a social affairs and solutions writer and author based in London. She's the author of several books, including the Indian socio-travelogue The Kama Sutra Diaries (Hachette) and is cofounder of The India Story Agency, a reporting partnership, with Geetanjali Krishna.

April Simpson joined the Center for Public Integrity in October 2020 as a senior reporter covering racial equity. She was previously the rural issues reporter at Stateline, an initiative of The Pew Charitable Trusts. Before joining Pew, April was associate editor of Current, where she covered public media and won...