I am a reporter with Reuters, based in Toronto. I am a deputy on the data journalism team, which is part of enterprise, our investigative unit. I work on investigative and in-depth explanatory stories, usually with a major data component. Before joining the data team, I spent almost a decade as a business beat reporter.

I am interested in finding new ways to report with large document sets, and working with spatial data. As a deputy, I am looking at when, where and how we should use artificial intelligence in our investigative reporting, from old school machine learning techniques to generative AI. I use these tools in my own reporting, other journalists come to me with questions and ideas, and I do some demos and training to keep the team and others we work with up to speed.

I worked on the modelling for our award-winning Bat Lands project, and led the process of making a large and complex set of documents from Syria easier to search and understand.

I mostly code in Python, but I have also spent a lot of time in R, and in graduate school we worked in Stata. I’m happy to pick up new languages as needed. I have more training in statistical methods than most journalists, and I still love a good spreadsheet and pivot table.

Investigative work

For The Bat Lands, we modelled the risk that new pandemics will come from bats, as my colleagues fanned out to understand what was happening in high risk areas all over the world. The project won awards from the Overseas Press club, the Online News Association and the Society of Environmental Journalists. Read more about our methods here.

I have also published on ammunition shortages in Ukraine, methane leaks, COVID test shortages in Africa, patient deaths at the clinics that serve remote indigenous communities, Mexico’s biggest gold mine, how the pharmaceutical industry responded to proposed drug price rules in Canada, and train derailments.

Beat reporting

As a company news reporter, I covered retailers, airlines, auto manufacturing, railways, mining, steel and aluminum companies, and labour unions, at various times.

I covered the early months of the COVID pandemic in Canada, and then helped our global pharmaceutical team report on the development and manufacturing of tests and vaccines around the world.

Background

I attended the University of Toronto, and reported for The Varsity. I planned to major in international relations and urban studies, but I go interested in econometrics (statistics for economists) and ended up picking up an economics major.

After interning at The Walrus and freelancing for a year, I completed McMaster University’s’s MA in Economic Policy, a fantastic, practical program where I learned more econometrics and got to work with education data. I interned at Reuters the summer after graduate school, and never left.

I have a special interest in reading instruction, dyslexia and academic remediation, and spend some of my free time reading and thinking about education research.