2021-2022

Sophie Burkholder

Sophie Burkholder is the lead reporter in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania for Technical.ly, the technology news network, where she focuses on economic development, equity, and access in the area's tech and innovation communities. A native of Pittsburgh, Burkholder has covered science, health, business and economics through internships and freelance work at Philadelphia Magazine, the Philadelphia Inquirer, PublicSource and TechCrunch. Her work has explored various topics, including the economic impact of the pandemic on Philadelphia's small business community, renewed grassroots efforts towards equity in the tech workforce, and the challenges of COVID-19 vaccine access for homebound patients. Burkholder earned both her bachelor's and master's degrees in bioengineering at the University of Pennsylvania, with an additional concentration in startup operations and entrepreneurship.

Alejandro Figueroa

Alejandro Figueroa reports for WYSO, the NPR affiliate station in Dayton, Ohio. He covers food insecurity in southwest Ohio, particularly the efforts by local organizations and government agencies to address a problem that has increased dramatically since the pandemic started. Figueroa was born in a small coastal town in Puerto Rico and in 2014 he and his family moved to Columbus, Ohio. He is a 2021 graduate of the E.W. Scripps School of Journalism at Ohio University, and while there he reported for The New Political, a student-run publication focused on politics and government. Figueroa covered news at the campus and city level, with a special interest in city government and the coal industry in southeast Ohio. As an intern for Ohio Magazine, he reported on great travel destinations in the state.

Anna Jean Kaiser

Anna Jean Kaiser reports on economic mobility in Miami-Dade County for the Miami Herald. A recipient of an Overseas Press Club scholarship, Kaiser will earn her master’s degree from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 2021. But before all of this, Kaiser, who is from the San Francisco Bay Area, graduated from the University of California, Santa Cruz, then moved to Brazil speaking only some Portuguese and having no journalism experience. Kaiser soon found herself fluent in the language and reporting for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Associated Press, and The Guardian, covering the Zika virus, President Dilma Rousseff’s impeachment, the Summer Olympics and the deforestation in the Amazon rainforest, among other stories. This multimedia journalist speaks Portuguese and Spanish, and in 2018 she made several trips to the Venezuelan border to report on the migration crisis and the Venezuelan diaspora, which inspired her to expand her beat beyond Brazil and report throughout the Americas.

Cheyanne Daniels

Cheyanne M. Daniels reports for the Chicago Sun-Times, covering the city's South and West Side neighborhoods. She hails from the south suburbs of Chicago, and earned her master's degree from Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism in 2021, specializing in politics, policy and foreign affairs reporting. As a grad student, Daniels reported on politics and policies affecting disenfranchised and minority communities, such as Illinois inmates' and their response to the pandemic and vaccines. Daniels' work has been published in the Wisconsin State Journal, the Grio, South Side Weekly, and by UPI. Previously, she was a research scholar for the Journalism, Ethics and Democracy Institute at Notre Dame. Daniels holds a bachelor's in journalism from Illinois' North Central College, where she served as news editor of The Chronicle and NCClinked, its online news site.

Jackson Stephens

Jackson Stephens is a multimedia journalist focusing on poverty for the Pacific Daily News in Hagatna, Guam. As a freelance reporter, he covered immigration, incarceration, international policy, protests and religion. His work has appeared in Capital & Main, the Religion News Service, the Pacific Council on International Policy, and Voice of America. Stephens, of Castro Valley, California, holds a master's degree in journalism from the USC Annenberg School. There he was an editor on the global city desk at Annenberg Media, USC's student-run newsroom. Stephens earned a bachelor's degree in international relations from the University of the Pacific, and studied abroad his junior year—one semester in Iringa, Tanzania and another in Santiago, Chile. He is fluent in Spanish and speaks basic Swahili.

Lautaro Grinspan

Lautaro Grinspan covers Latino and Asian immigrant communities for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Grinspan was previously a Report for America corps member in South Florida, reporting on immigration, the Latino vote and daily life issues among the area's Latin American diasporas. His stories appeared in English in the Miami Herald and in Spanish in El Nuevo Herald. Grinspan has interned at NPR's “Weekend Edition” and at WBUR, Boston's NPR news station, and was an engagement manager at Vox, a news site. As an editorial fellow for Washingtonian magazine, he authored the magazine's first Spanish-language stories. Grinspan grew up in Argentina and France before moving to South Florida as a teen.

Olivia Sun

Olivia Sun is a photojournalist with the Colorado Sun in Denver, covering statewide politics, education and the environment. Before this, she spent two years in her home state at the Des Moines Register photographing daily news, focusing on economic disparities, investigations and coronavirus coverage. Sun holds a bachelor's degree from the University of Iowa, and while studying journalism and film she interned at The Chautauquan Daily in western New York, the China Daily in Beijing, and NPR's science desk in Washington, D.C. Sun's coverage of the 2020 caucus season has appeared in Liberation, the San Francisco Chronicle, The Associated Press, The Washington Post and more.

Stefania Lugli

Stefania Lugli is a watchdog and community reporter for The Wichita Beacon, a nonprofit online news outlet in Wichita, Kansas. She covers Wichita communities that have been forgotten by the local media. This multimedia reporter has worked as a metro correspondent for The Boston Globe, and earned her bachelor’s degree in journalism from Emerson College in 2020. Born into a Venezuelan family, Lugli grew up in Cape Coral, Florida, is fluent in Spanish and is a member of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists. She interned with The GroundTruth Project and with the GBH News Center for Investigative Reporting in Boston. In 2019 she won a scholarship to participate in the Knight Foundation’s NAHJ Student Project. Lugli enjoys being a plant mama and is waiting for the day she can swim with the manatees.

Annie Rosenthal

Annie Rosenthal is the border reporter at Marfa Public Radio, which is based in Marfa, Texas. In 2020, as a Yale Parker Huang Fellow focused on migration and criminal justice and fluent in Spanish, Rosenthal helped to produce a bilingual radio show, tracked COVID deaths in U.S. prisons, and freelanced for publications like Politico Magazine and the Los Angeles Review of Books. She previously covered rural Alaskan life for the Homer News, the local paper in “the halibut fishing capital of the world,” and reported on immigration and the legal system as an intern at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Rosenthal received her B.A. from Yale University, where she was editor-in-chief of The New Journal, a long-form magazine about New Haven. Her thesis reporting on the search for missing migrants in Arizona earned her a 2020 Overseas Press Club Scholar Award and Yale's John Hersey Prize for journalism. Her hometown is Washington, D.C.

Claire Potter

Claire Potter reports on environmental issues for the Valley News in West Lebanon, New Hampshire. Previously, she was a research intern for the “The Axe Files,” David Axelrod's podcast on CNN's site. Potter graduated Phi Beta Kappa with a bachelor's degree in American History and English Literature from The University of Chicago in 2021, where she was a managing editor and contributor to Expositions, the student-run magazine covering environmental issues. Potter has written about Illinois' child welfare and juvenile justice systems for the student paper, The Chicago Maroon, and reported on the Iowa caucuses for ABC's political news site during the summer of 2019. A Pulitzer Center fellow, Potter has reported on the activists and urban planners who are reintroducing wetlands and rivers into Mexico City. She grew up in Warwick, New York.