Speaker Bios

Sophie Culpepper is a staff writer at Nieman Lab covering local news. She previously co-founded the hyperlocal Lexington Observer, where she reported on public schools, local government, economic development, and public safety among other topics as the digital news nonprofit’s only full-time journalist for two years. She is a proud alum of and forever believer in student journalism, and was a managing editor at her independent college newspaper, The Brown Daily Herald.

Silvia Foster-Frau is a national investigative reporter covering immigration for The Washington Post, where she broke news on the migrants held by the U.S. in Guantanamo Bay and changes to the Trump administration’s refugee admissions program. She also reported in depth on the migrants held in El Salvador’s megaprison, immigration arrests, and family separations. For years, she has covered mass shootings, including anchoring two stories in the Post’s “American Icon” series on the AR-15 semi-automatic rifles, which won the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting. Foster-Frau additionally wrote the 2024 investigative series “Toxic Taps” on access to safe drinking water in marginalized communities. She previously worked at the San Antonio Express-News in Texas, where she covered immigration and border affairs and was the lead reporter on the 2017 Sutherland Springs mass shooting. She is the former president of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists D.C. Chapter. Her work has also been recognized by the White House Correspondents Association, NAHJ, Best of the West, and Texas Managing Editors.

Marcela García is a Boston Globe opinion columnist and associate editor whose commentaries focus on immigration, social inequities, and Hispanic issues. In 2023, she launched ¡Mira!, the Globe’s first bilingual weekly newsletter, written in English and Spanish. She also has worked as a special contributor to the Boston Business Journal and was the editor of El Planeta, Boston’s largest Spanish-language publication. In 2025, she was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Editorial Writing along with two colleagues. In 2023, García was recognized by the New England Chapter of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists with its first-ever Impact Award for her “thoroughly reported” columns on issues affecting Latinos. Originally from Monterrey, México, García has lived in Boston for more than two decades.

Jonathan Gaston-Falk is an education law attorney at the Student Press Law Center (SPLC) with broad experience representing both school district and student clients. Gaston-Falk was a student journalist for the inaugural class of contributors for the York High School newspaper The Talon in Yorktown, Virginia. He earned a bachelor’s degree from the University of Virginia and a Juris Doctor and master’s degree in urban planning from the State University of New York at Buffalo. Gaston-Falk joined SPLC as a staff attorney in March 2022 following a five-year tenure with the Legal Aid Society of Rochester, New York, where he was program director of the Education Law Unit. While there, he advocated for the free speech rights of students before countless boards of education and the Commissioner of Education in Albany.

Jessica Glenza is a senior health reporter for the Guardian US, based in New York. Her wide-ranging reporting covers medicine, law, business, and politics, with recent investigations into medical debt collection and consolidation among nonprofit hospital chains. She has a special interest in health financing, scientific integrity, and inequality. Previously, Glenza worked at a small newspaper in Connecticut, where her reporting on bullying and sexual assault became the basis for a federal lawsuit and won multiple awards. A native of St. Petersburg, Florida, her personal work includes a print-only literary journal about the state called South of the South. She is studying law, science, and history in an examination of healthcare financing.

Hannah Natanson is a reporter for The Washington Post covering the Trump administration’s transformation of government. She previously covered education for six years and won a Peabody Award in 2024 for a podcast series on school gun violence. She also was part of a team of Post journalists awarded the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for coverage of the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol; and part of another team of Post journalists who were finalists for the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News for coverage of mass shootings in Dayton and El Paso. Natanson graduated from Harvard, where she served as managing editor of The Harvard Crimson. In January 2026, FBI agents searched her home and confiscated several electronic devices, including her phone and two laptops. The move drew widespread criticism from press freedom groups.

Andrew Ryan is a member of the Spotlight Team at The Boston Globe, where he has been an investigative reporter for a decade. With an expertise in public records, his reporting has held the powerful to account, with a focus on government officials, law enforcement, and other influential institutions. He was part of the teams behind three of the Globe’s award-winning, investigative podcasts: “Snitch City”, “Murder in Boston” and “Gladiator: Aaron Hernandez and Football Inc.” With the Spotlight Team, he was a 2018 Pulitzer finalist in Local Reporting for a series examining race in Boston and has also shared in a duPont-Columbia Award, Emmy Award, and more. Ryan joined the paper in 2006 to launch the Globe’s first online news desk in 2006 and later served as Boston City Hall bureau chief. He previously worked for The Associated Press, South Florida Sun-Sentinel, The Day of New London, Conn., and the Highbridge Horizon in the Bronx. In 2024, he was a Murrey Marder Nieman Fellow in Watchdog Journalism at Harvard University, where he studied whether artificial intelligence could help reinvigorate local investigative and accountability reporting. He also earned a master’s degree from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and a bachelor’s degree in creative writing from Loras College in Dubuque, Iowa.

Sotiris Sideris is the data editor at the Center for Collaborative Investigative Journalism (CCIJ) in the U.S. and Reporters United in Greece. He leads global investigations and training in data, OSINT, and AI, with a dedicated focus on accountability reporting. His work focuses on housing and land injustice, fossil fuels, the climate crisis, corporate malpractices, disinformation, migration, and human rights. He also teaches data journalism at the University of Athens and online media at Hochschule Macromedia in Berlin. In 2015, he co-founded AthensLive, Greece’s first English-language nonprofit outlet. He and his teams have won several awards, including the European Press Prize for Innovation.

Daniel Strauss most recently was a national political reporter for CNN based in Washington, D.C., His reporting focused on major political spending spanning the country and the key players in national politics. Previously, he was a features writer for The New Republic, where he broke major investigative and national news for the magazine’s website on topics ranging from national politics to international soccer. He additionally covered Washington from an international perspective as a senior political reporter for The Guardian and was a campaigns and elections reporter for Politico, where he also wrote profiles.