I reported and produced my first radio pieces at WORT in Madison, Wis., where I volunteered on the afternoon news show. In 2015, I got a job covering health at the NPR affiliate in Indianapolis just weeks before the state announced an HIV outbreak in Austin, Ind. — an international news event that pulled me into years of daily stories, features and investigations into addiction and Medicaid, among other public health issues. Those stories appeared locally and nationally on shows like NPR’s All Things Considered, Morning Edition, LatinoUSA, Here & Now and Kaiser Health News.
During the pandemic, I brushed up on some latent coding skills to dig into state prisons, scraping state data to find potential sources to tell me what was happening inside. My prison reporting led to a wage increase for correctional staff, a departmental investigation into the Indiana Women’s Prison, the forced retirement of a warden and an all-staff email sent to state employees warning them not to talk to me.