Obed Manuel

Until recently, Obed he was an associate editor at Central Track in Dallas, where he was focused on city news/politics and social change movements. He previously worked as managing editor of Latina Lista, where he launched a weekly podcast and wrote on immigration and technology. A graduate of the Mayborn School of Journalism at University of North Texas, Manuel was a staff writer for the North Texas Daily and a two-time intern at the Dallas Observer. In 2015, Manuel assisted former Dallas Observer editor Joe Tone with research for “Bones,” a book about money laundering through the quarter horse racing industry. A native of the northern Mexican city of Monterrey, Manuel reports on the growing population of second-generation Hispanic immigrants and the issues they face.

Natasha Rausch

Natasha was a business reporter at Bloomberg News in New York City, where she covered health care in America, industrial companies, such as General Electric, and equity and debt markets. She spent her senior year of college reporting on the town of Whiteclay, Nebraska, which sold millions of cans of beer a year to the dry Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. She was a three-time national Hearst finalist for her stories there, and her class won the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award for their investigative reporting, beating the New Yorker and HBO. During her undergraduate education at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, she also interned for the Oregonian, USA TODAY, the Omaha World-Herald and the Norfolk Daily News.

Michelle Liu

Michelle was a reporting intern for the Toledo Blade, and a general assignment intern for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. As a reporter for the Yale Daily News and a contributing reporter for the New Haven Independent, she shadowed canvassers in New Hampshire and covered labor unions in Connecticut. She was also a program coordinator for Yale’s Summer Journalism Program for high school students. Since joining Report for America, Liu has covered criminal justice for Mississippi Today. The Institute for Non-Profit News named Michelle’s reporting on the spike of prison deaths in Mississippi as one of the “Best in Nonprofit News” in 2018. Her continued reporting on this and other stories not only helped lead the MDOC to invite the FBI to get involved in the investigation of these deaths, but her dogged records requests were cited by the Department of Corrections while asking the Legislature to exempt agencies from parts of the Public Records Act. More recently, the Mississippi Humanities Council invited Michelle to moderate a panel titled, “Locked Up: Criminal Justice in Mississippi.” She continues this work in her second year with Report for America.

Megan Taros

Megan began at a small community newspaper in Los Angeles while attending community college. She continued this work at SFBay in San Francisco, Latin Times in New York and Patch in New Jersey. She has a B.A. in journalism from San Francisco State University and an M.S. from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, where she focused on Latino health and social issues.

Manuela Tobias

Manuela is a former staff writer for PolitiFact, where she covered politics, health care, immigration and international trade. She was also a researcher for Politico, a research assistant at The New Yorker, and an intern at New York Magazine. She was a 2018 International Fact-Checking Network Fellow and contributed research to an ASME award-winning multimedia feature, “This is The Story of One Block in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn”. Originally from Buenos Aires, Argentina, Tobias lived in New Hampshire, New Jersey and London before moving to Washington, D.C. She has a B.A. in comparative literature from Georgetown University.

Lorin Eleni Avendaño

Eleni is a multimedia reporter who was born and raised in Honolulu. As a business reporter at Pacific Business News, she covered health care, nonprofits and tourism, writing about the Affordable Care Act, alternative lodging and the controversy over the Thirty Meter Telescope in Hawaii. She has won numerous awards for excellence in journalism from the Society of Professional Journalists Hawaii Chapter. Eleni studied international relations and communications at American University and will complete her master's degree in journalism from UC Berkeley in May 2019.

Lautaro Grinspan

Lautaro has been an editorial fellow for Washingtonian magazine, where he reported on the city’s Hispanic and immigrant communities, authoring Washingtonian’s first Spanish-language stories. Previously he interned at NPR (Weekend Edition) and WBUR in Boston. He also worked as an engagement manager at Vox.com and a digital attache aide and trade assistant at the U.S. Department of Commerce. As a student at Northeastern University, he was a college correspondent for USA Today.

Lauren Lindstrom

Lauren has been a reporter at The Blade in Toledo for nearly five years, most recently on the health beat covering everything from Ohio’s heroin and opioid epidemic to Toledo’s efforts to reduce childhood lead poisoning. Her work has won several state and local awards for investigation and breaking news, including the Press Club of Toledo’s 2017 Touchstone Award for a series examining the lack of local oversight on homes with unsafe lead levels. Originally from Wisconsin, she interned at the Green Bay Press Gazette and Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Lauren majored in journalism with a minor in Spanish at Northwestern University, where she was news editor for North by Northwestern, an independent student magazine.

Kelan Lyons

Kelan was a staff writer for Salt Lake City Weekly, where he wrote about immigration, economic development and state and local politics. Before that, in Texas, he covered the Brazos County courthouse for the Bryan-College Station Eagle, where he won a 2018 Texas Associated Press Managing Editors first-place feature writing award for his story on how a 35-year-old cold case still affects the community. He was a fellow at City Bureau in Chicago, where he produced an audio documentary about police misconduct settlements. He majored in psychology at University of Pittsburgh and graduated with an M.S. from Northwestern University, where he was an Alfred Balk scholarship recipient.

Katherine Lewin

Katherine began her reporting career at Miami Today News and has worked as a freelance multimedia producer for Al Jazeera. In 2018, she received a grant from the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting to cover Cuba’s housing crisis. Katherine has won several awards from the Society of Professional Journalists for both her reporting and photo essays. She earned a B.A. in journalism from Flagler College, where she worked at The Gargoyle student newspaper producing award-winning coverage of refugees and civil rights in Northeast Florida.