Diana Fuentes
Executive Director, Investigative Reporters & Editors

Diana R. Fuentes is a proud second-generation Texan and Latina who grew up on the Texas-Mexico border. She is executive director of Investigative Reporters & Editors, a nonprofit organization that trains journalists around the world in the latest data analysis and investigative reporting techniques. Fuentes has been a journalist for more than 35 years, from copy editor and police reporter to executive editor and publisher. She has a master’s degree and teaches at Texas State University. Fuentes is past president of the Freedom of Information Foundation of Texas and serves on the Board of Governors of the Headliners Foundation of Texas, among other professional and community activities.

Mark Greenblatt
Senior National Investigative Correspondent, Scripps Washington Bureau

Mark Greenblatt is a 3-time Peabody Award-winning reporter for video, podcasts and digital investigative platforms. He is the senior national investigative correspondent for Scripps News and works from Washington D.C., while his stories are distributed nationally across all Scripps media national networks and local television stations. Mark is also the lead reporter on the multi-episode investigative podcast Verified-The Next Threat, which exposed a rising global network of white supremacists and caught the attention of the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Counterterrorism, which took action against the network after the release of the podcast. Mark is the former student president of the University of Missouri School of Journalism,  serves as an elected member of the Board of Directors of Investigative Reporters & Editors (www.ire.org ), is a father, a Red Sox fan and he brews his own beer.  

Huo Jingnan
Associate Producer, NPR

Huo Jingnan is a reporter curious about how people navigate complex information landscapes and all the actors shaping that journey.

Previously, she was an associate producer on NPR’s Investigations team, where she worked with journalists in the network and at member stations to produce original, in-depth reporting. She looked into how many homes sold by the federal government are in flood zones, investigated why face mask guidelines differ between countries, and helped gauge the federal government’s role behind black lung disease’s resurgence. The projects she worked on have won awards including Edward Murrow Award, NASEM Communications award, Silver Gavel Award, and have also been nominated for Emmy Awards and George Foster Peabody awards.

Huo has a master’s degree in journalism from Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, and a bachelor’s degree in law from Southwest University of Political Science and Law in Chongqing, China.

Danielle Ivory
Investigative Reporter, The New York Times

Danielle Ivory is a prize-winning investigative reporter for The New York Times. Since joining The Times in 2013, she has written about deadly auto-safety defects; Wall Street’s push into public services; the federal government; the war in Ukraine; and the coronavirus pandemic.

As part of The Times’s sprawling effort to cover the pandemic, Ms. Ivory helped lead a group of journalists in collecting and analyzing Covid-19 and vaccine data, powering dozens of stories and tools across the newsroom. For her work tracking the virus, she was part of a team that won the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service, as well as the 2020 Philip Meyer Journalism award and a 2020 Sigma Delta Chi award.

Ms. Ivory received the 2018 John B. Oakes award for her reporting on the Environmental Protection Agency. She also received a 2014 Scripps Howard award, a 2014 Society of Business Editors and Writers award and a 2015 Deadline Club award as part of a team that covered General Motors’s ignition switch crisis and government inattention to auto defects.

Zolan Kanno-Youngs
White House Correspondent, The New York Times

Zolan Kanno-Youngs is a White House correspondent covering a range of domestic and international issues in the Biden White House, including homeland security and extremism.

Mr. Kanno-Youngs joined The New York Times in 2019 to cover the Department of Homeland Security, breaking stories on the detention of migrants, immigration enforcement, the Secret Service, protests and the federal government’s response to national emergencies. He previously covered criminal justice for The Wall Street Journal. A graduate of Northeastern University, Mr. Kanno-Youngs was raised in Cambridge, Mass. He writes screenplays in his spare time.

David Kurpius
Dean, Missouri School of Journalism

Since David D. Kurpius joined the Missouri School of Journalism as dean in 2015, he has implemented an ongoing strategic planning process, engaging faculty, staff, students, alumni and industry leaders, to chart the next century of work for the School. This resulted in a future-focused and student-centered curriculum with increased student graduation and success rates, improved newsroom structures, more local journalism coverage, and broad growth in diversity, equity and inclusion.
Under his leadership, the School has raised more than $80 million to fund faculty fellowships, student scholarships, expanded local journalism, and innovative strategic communications, among other initiatives. The School has grown its grant expenditures, built a science communication focus, expanded its health communication research, increased collaborations and partnerships across campus, in the state of Missouri and beyond.

Kurpius started his career as a local television reporter. The core of his work is to improve local journalism in service to democratic life. His research and leadership continually emphasize this effort. He actively engages the School’s Reynolds Journalism Institute and oversees the School’s six professional newsrooms, which are now operating as a One Newsroom, to provide impactful local coverage via multimedia platforms.

Kurpius is actively involved in advancing the field of journalism and mass communication. Since 2013, he has led and served as a member of Accrediting Council on Education in Journalism and Mass Communications’ accreditation site teams. He is on the steering committee of the Hearst Journalism Awards Program and is a member of professional organizations such as the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication, International Communication Association, National Association of Black Journalists and Investigative Reporters & Editors.

Kurpius earned a bachelor’s degree in telecommunications from Indiana University’s Media School and master’s and doctoral degrees in journalism and mass communication from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His research on building newsrooms that focus on civic responsibility and diversity and inclusion appears in more than 20 peer-reviewed journals and books.

Carrie Levine
Story Editor, VoteBeat

Carrie Levine is a story editor for Votebeat. She was previously a senior reporter for the Center for Public Integrity, where she covered voting access, money in politics and influence. Before that, she was research director at Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), a nonpartisan watchdog group. She previously reported and edited for Legal Times and the National Law Journal, the Charlotte Observer. A graduate of Boston University and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, she is based in Washington, D.C.

Josh Meyer
Domestic Security Correspondent, USA Today

Josh Meyer has spent 35 years reporting on law enforcement and intelligence issues, including terrorism and trafficking in drugs, weapons and humans. Prior to joining USA Today in 2021, he was a senior investigative reporter at Politico, NBC News, and for 20 years, a national security reporter for the Los Angeles Times. His coverage of al-Qaeda later became “The Hunt For KSM: Inside the Pursuit and Takedown of the Real 9/11 Mastermind, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.”

Gunita Singh
Staff Attorney, Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press

Gunita Singh is an attorney at RCFP where she litigates against state and federal agencies using freedom of information laws and helps reporters with records requests. She has co-authored two publications analyzing the role of news media in providing information about COVID-19. Singh was previously an attorney at Property of the People, a DC-based FOIA operation.  She received her J.D. from Georgetown and serves on the board of LION Publishers.

Sarah D. Wire
Staff Writer, Los Angeles Times

Sarah D. Wire covers government accountability, the Justice Department and national security for the Los Angeles Times with a focus on the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection and domestic extremism.

She previously covered Congress for The Times. Wire was the Washington correspondent for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette and was a statehouse reporter in Arkansas, Idaho and Missouri. Wire graduated from the University of Missouri. She contributed to the Times team that won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for breaking news coverage of the San Bernardino shooting and received the Sigma Delta Chi award for Washington Correspondence in 2020. She serves on the National Press Club Board of Governors.

Alison Young
Curtis B. Hurley Chair in Public Affairs Reporting and
Director, Washington Program, Missouri School of Journalism

Alison Young is the Curtis B. Hurley Chair in Public Affairs Reporting and Washington Program director for the Missouri School of Journalism. Before joining the university in 2019, she spent nearly 10 years as an investigative reporter for USA TODAY. Before that she reported for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Knight Ridder Washington Bureau and the Detroit Free Press. She is a past president of Investigative Reporters and Editors’ board of directors. Young’s current reporting projects involve exposing safety risks at biological research labs, a topic she has covered for 15 years. Her first book – Pandora’s Gamble: Lab Leaks, Pandemics, and a World at Risk – is scheduled for release on April 25. Twitter: @alisonannyoung