Team
Julia Angwin
Founder, CEO, Editor-in-Chief
Julia Angwin is an award-winning investigative journalist, a bestselling author, and a New York Times contributing Opinion writer.
At the newsroom she founded, The Markup, she codified the practice of publishing rigorous methodologies and the code and data used in the newsroom’s analyses, so that anyone could check or refute the conclusions.
Her landmark investigations into privacy at The Wall Street Journal pioneered the use of engineers to forensically examine digital surveillances. At ProPublica, she forged a new field of algorithmic accountability with investigations that revealed racial bias in criminal risk assessment algorithms and prompted several discrimination lawsuits against Facebook for its biased ad placement algorithms.
She is a winner and two-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Explanatory Reporting. She is also the author of the New York Times bestseller “Dragnet Nation: A Quest for Privacy, Security and Freedom in a World of Relentless Surveillance” (Times Books, 2014) and “Stealing MySpace: The Battle to Control the Most Popular Website in America” (Random House, March 2009).
She earned a B.A. in mathematics from the University of Chicago and an MBA from the Graduate School of Business at Columbia University. She is currently a Walter Shorenstein Media and Democracy Fellow at Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy and was previously Entrepreneur in Residence at Columbia Journalism School’s Brown Institute for Media Innovation.
Nhadine Leung
Chief Operating Officer
Nhadine brings over 25 years of diverse experience in the nonprofit, legal, and banking sectors. Her career, which has included executive roles at organizations including the Heron Foundation, Girl Scouts of the USA, Mission Investors Exchange, and Living Cities, has been dedicated to supporting the people, places, and organizations working to make our communities and the world a better place for all. Before her career in the nonprofit sector, Nhadine practiced law at Weil Gotshal & Manges and worked as an investment banker/currency trader in New York.
Contributors
Claire Brown
Reporter
Claire provides research, reporting, and writing support to Proof’s AI and Democracy investigations. Before joining Proof, Claire was a Knight-Bagehot Fellow at Columbia University. She has also worked as a senior staff writer at The Counter, a nonprofit news publication that covered food and agriculture. Her freelance work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Guardian, and The Intercept.
Lauren Feeney
Executive Producer
Lauren oversees video production for Proof’s key projects. She has devoted her career to experimenting with new forms and new platforms for serious documentary and investigative video journalism, including many years as a senior digital producer for PBS and more recently as director of video for The Intercept. Lauren’s work has been featured on-air and online at PBS, The New York Times, The Atlantic, and The Intercept, among other publications, and has been honored with four Edward R. Murrow awards and an Emmy nomination among other distinctions.
Aaron Gordon
Investigative Climate Reporter
Aaron works with Proof’s editors to pursue and share insights about the intersection of climate and technology. Prior to Proof, Aaron was a senior staff writer at Motherboard, VICE News’s tech and science website, where he covered transportation, infrastructure, and the environment. Before Motherboard, Aaron was a senior investigative reporter at Jalopnik, transportation reporter for the Village Voice, founder of the NYC subway newsletter Signal Problems, and staff writer at VICE Sports.
Rina Palta
Data Editor
Rina provides editing and data journalism oversight to several of Proof’s key projects. Before joining Proof, she worked as news editor at The Markup. Rina spent the majority of her career covering prisons, crime, and homelessness as an investigative reporter for KPCC in Los Angeles and KALW in San Francisco. Her work has been honored with an Edward R. Murrow Award and a Gerald Loeb Award.