Writers

Abrahm Lustgarten

Environmental Reporter

Abrahm Lustgarten is a senior environmental reporter with a focus on the intersection of business, climate and energy. His 2015 series examining the causes of water scarcity in the American west, “Killing the Colorado,” was a finalist for the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting and received the 2016 Keck Futures Initiative Communication Award from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. (One story, “End of the Miracle Machines,” in the series is highlighted at Showcase.) Before joining ProPublica in 2008, Lustgarten was a staff writer at Fortune. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, Scientific American, Wired, Salon, and Esquire, among other publications. He is the author of two books: Run to Failure: BP and the Making of the Deepwater Horizon Disaster and China’s Great Train: Beijing’s Drive West and the Campaign to Remake Tibet. The second project was funded in part by a grant from the MacArthur Foundation. Lustgarten earned a master’s in journalism from Columbia University in 2003 and holds a bachelor’s degree in anthropology from Cornell.

Amy Maxmen

Science Journalist

Amy Maxmen is an award-winning science journalist who covers the entanglements of evolution, medicine, policy and of people behind research. Her stories appear in a variety of outlets, including Wired, National Geographic, Nature, Newsweek, and the New York Times. Her National Geographic story “How the Fight Against Ebola Tested a Culture’s Traditions” (featured on Showcase) won NASW’s Science in Society Award in 2016. She’s currently a full-time reporter at Nature. Maxmen holds a Ph.D. from Harvard in evolutionary biology.

Maryn McKenna

Senior science writer

Maryn McKenna is a senior writer at WIRED, where she covers public health and global health, and a senior fellow at the Center for the Study of Human Health at Emory University, where she teaches health and science writing and storytelling. She is the recipient of the 2023 Victor Cohn Prize for Excellence in Medical Science Reporting, a career award, and the 2019 AAAS-Kavli Gold Award for magazine writing for her piece “The Plague Years” in The New Republic (featured on Showcase), among many other honors. She is the author of the 2017 bestseller BIG CHICKEN: The Incredible Story of How Antibiotics Created Modern Agriculture and Changed the Way the World Eats, which received the 2018 Science in Society Award and was named a best book of 2017 by Amazon, Smithsonian, Science News, WIRED, Civil Eats, and other publications as well as the award-winning books Superbug and Beating Back the Devil. She was a 2018 Poynter Fellow in Journalism at Yale University and a Knight Foundation science journalism fellow at MIT and the University of Michigan.

Phil McKenna

Environmental Journalist

Phil McKenna is staff writer for InsideClimate News, where he covers energy and the environment with a focus on the individuals behind the news. He has previously written for the New York Times, Smithsonian, WIRED, Audubon, New Scientist, MIT echnology Review, MATTER, NOVA Next and others. “Uprising” (featured on Showcase) won the 2013 AAAS Kavli Science Journalism Award and the 2014 NASW Science in Society Award. He has a master’s degree in science writing from MIT and was an environmental journalism fellow at Middlebury College.

Matthew Miller

Journalist and Storytelling Coach

Matthew Miller is the storytelling coach at the Lansing State Journal. He writes about science and religion, but seldom about their intersection. His State Journal story “Battle of the Ash Borer” (featured on Showcase) won the AAAS Kavli Science Journalism Award in 2015 for the small newspaper category.

Maya Miller

Engagement Reporter

Maya Miller is an engagement reporter at ProPublica working on community-sourced investigations. She’s collaborated across and beyond the newsroom on series about aggressive medical debt collection practices, housing and evictions, as well as toxic air pollution and health. The impact of her reporting includes a national doctors’ group announcing it would stop suing patients for medical debt, state legislators introducing a bill to repeal a criminal eviction statute, as well as federal lawmakers and officials promising investigations and reforms.

Her reporting within ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network, which has included working with residents to monitor air quality and crowdsourcing real-time reactions to air pollution (such as in the Black Snow project, featured on Showcase), has contributed to several awards. These include a 2020 Selden Ring Award and Gerald Loeb Award (“Profiting from the Poor”), as well as a 2021 finalist for the Anthony Shadid Award for Journalism Ethics and the Gather Award in Engaged Journalism (“State of Denial”). Her work has appeared in NBC Investigations, Chicago magazine and the Chicago Tribune, among others. She lives in New York and speaks Spanish.

Ash Ngu

News Applications Developer

Ash Ngu is a reporter, designer and developer with a focus on making sense of data for impact and accountability. They currently build data visualizations, stories and tools as a news applications developer at ProPublica. They worked on the 2021 Black Snow series with The Palm Beach Post, which explored the health and environmental impacts of South Florida’s sugar industry on rural communities. (One of the stories in this series is featured on Showcase.)

Gavin Off

Data reporter

Gavin Off has been the Charlotte Observer’s data reporter since 2011. He previously worked as a data reporter at the Tulsa World and at Scripps Howard News Service in Washington, D.C. His journalism, including his data analysis and reporting for the investigative series Big Poultry (featured on Showcase), has won multiple national journalism awards.

Dennis Overbye

Science Reporter

Dennis Overbye has been at the New York Times for almost 20 years, first as the deputy science editor and then as a reporter with a beat ranging from zero-gravity fashion shows to the fate of the universe and the various dark things that make most of nature. Pluto is still a planet in his household. “Chasing the Higgs” (featured on Showcase) was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2014 and the winner of the National Academies Keck Futures Initiative Communication award. Overbye is the author of two books, Lonely Hearts of the Cosmos, the Scientific Search for the Secret of the Universe, which won the American Institute of Physics science-writing prize and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for nonfiction, and Einstein in Love, a Scientific Romance.

Charles Piller

Writer and Editor

Charles Piller, STAT’s West Coast editor, writes watchdog reports and in-depth projects from his base in the San Francisco Bay Area. He previously worked as an investigative journalist for The Sacramento Bee and the Los Angeles Times, and has reported on public health, science, and technology from Africa, Asia, Europe, and Central America. Charles has won numerous journalism awards (his story “Failure to Report” is featured on Showcase), has authored two investigative books about science, and also has reported extensively on national security, prison conditions, and bridge engineering. Follow him on Twitter @cpiller.