Our Staff

Aman Azhar is a Washington, D.C.-based journalist who covers environmental justice for Inside Climate News with focus on Baltimore-Maryland area. He has previously worked as a broadcast journalist and multimedia producer for the BBC World Service, VOA News and other international news organizations, reporting from London, Islamabad, the United Arab Emirates and New York. He holds a graduate degree in Anthropology of Media from University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) and an MA in Political Science from the University of the Punjab, and is the recipient of the Chevening scholarship from the UK government and an academic scholarship for graduate studies from the Australian government.

Dylan Baddour covers the energy sector and environmental justice in Texas. Born in Houston, he’s worked the business desk at the Houston Chronicle, covered the U.S.-Mexico border for international outlets and reported for several years from Colombia for media like The Washington Post, BBC News and The Atlantic. He also spent two years investigating armed groups in Latin America for the global security department at Facebook before returning to Texas journalism. Baddour holds bachelor’s degrees in journalism and Latin American studies from the University of Texas at Austin. He has lived in Argentina, Kazakhstan and Colombia and speaks fluent Spanish.

Danish Bajwa is a sophomore at Harvard College studying government and psychology as well as a spring fellow at Inside Climate News. Through studying public policy implementation and conducting psychology research he became all too aware of the gap between policy and science. Danish’s interest in journalism is an attempt to bridge this gap and to understand people and the world at a deeper level. Previously, Danish worked as a senior reporter for The Crimson covering the townships of Allston-Brighton.

Bob Berwyn an Austria-based reporter who has covered climate science and international climate policy for more than a decade. Previously, he reported on the environment, endangered species and public lands for several Colorado newspapers, and also worked as editor and assistant editor at community newspapers in the Colorado Rockies.

Myía Borland is a senior journalism major attending Howard University in Washington, D.C.

Megan Boyle is Vice President of Development, Operations & Marketing for Inside Climate News. Prior to joining ICN, she served as vice president for marketing and communications for Yellowstone Forever, where she oversaw strategic marketing, fundraising, and digital initiatives. She also served as executive director of marketing and communications at Pepperdine University, leading marketing and communications initiatives including editorial strategy, social media, public and media relations, advertising, and web. She earned her master’s degree in English literature from the University of Edinburgh and her bachelor’s degree in English, magna cum laude, from Georgetown University.

James Bruggers covers the U.S. Southeast, part of Inside Climate News’ National Environment Reporting Network. He previously covered energy and the environment for Louisville’s Courier Journal, where he worked as a correspondent for USA Today and was a member of the USA Today Network environment team. Before moving to Kentucky in 1999, Bruggers worked as a journalist in Montana, Alaska, Washington and California. Bruggers’ work has won numerous recognitions, including best beat reporting, Society of Environmental Journalists, and the National Press Foundation’s Thomas Stokes Award for energy reporting. He served on the board of directors of the SEJ for 13 years, including two years as president. He lives in Louisville with his wife, Christine Bruggers.

Aydali Campa covers environmental justice at Inside Climate News. She grew up on the U.S.-Mexico border in Arizona and taught third and fourth grade in Oklahoma City before pursuing a master’s degree in investigative journalism from Arizona State University. As a bilingual reporter with experience in multimedia, she has covered education, Covid-19 and transborder issues. Her previous work can be seen in The Wall Street Journal, The Arizona Republic and Arizona PBS.

Darreonna Davis is a senior journalism major at Howard University and contributor for the Howard University News Service who covers Louisiana, Mississippi, Texas, Oklahoma, Wyoming, Utah, Colorado, New Mexico and Kansas. She is among the inaugural Howard University News Service and Inside Climate News partnership fellows. Previously, Darreonna interned on the breaking news desk at Forbes as an HBCU Scholar and Emma Bowen Foundation fellow.

Delaney Dryfoos is a science journalist based in New York City and a fall fellow at Inside Climate News. She is a graduate student at New York University’s Science, Health & Environmental Reporting Program, where she also works as the managing editor for Scienceline. She is passionate about reporting on the intersection of health and the environment as well as working to make journalism more inclusive of disabled and LGBTQ+ sources and reporters. Previously, she worked in global health research, nonprofit communications and environmental radio show production. She studied biology, global health, policy journalism and media studies at Duke University.

Laila Gad is a junior in the Macaulay Honors Program at Hunter College, where she is majoring in journalism and minoring in environmental science. As a pre-med student, she is really passionate about the intersections between aging and climate change, specifically when it comes to heat. She has been dedicated to raising awareness of the impact redlining has had on the severity of urban heat island effect in NYC. Joining Inside Climate News via the CUNY Climate Scholars, she is looking forward to covering the latest in climate justice and policy.

Dan Gearino covers the midwestern United States, part of ICN’s National Environment Reporting Network. His coverage deals with the business side of the clean-energy transition and he writes ICN’s Inside Clean Energy newsletter. He came to ICN in 2018 after a nine-year tenure at The Columbus Dispatch, where he covered the business of energy. Before that, he covered politics and business in Iowa and in New Hampshire. He grew up in Warren County, Iowa, just south of Des Moines, and lives in Columbus, Ohio.

Liza Gross is a reporter for Inside Climate News based in Northern California. She is the author of The Science Writers’ Investigative Reporting Handbook and a contributor to The Science Writers’ Handbook, both funded by National Association of Science Writers’ Peggy Girshman Idea Grants. She has long covered science, conservation, agriculture, public and environmental health and justice with a focus on the misuse of science for private gain. Prior to joining ICN, she worked as a part-time magazine editor for the open-access journal PLOS Biology, a reporter for the Food & Environment Reporting Network and produced freelance stories for numerous national outlets, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, Discover and Mother Jones. Her work has won awards from the Association of Health Care Journalists, American Society of Journalists and Authors, Society of Professional Journalists NorCal and Association of Food Journalists.

Paul Horn has been supporting ICN reporters’ stories with infographics, locator maps, charts, diagrams and illustrations since 2012. He brings an award-winning, 27-year pedigree to the table, featuring long tenures at Reno Gazette-Journal, The San Diego Union-Tribune, Copley News Service/Creators Syndicate and Infographic World.

Derrick Z. Jackson is an award-winning journalist and author. He was the 2021 winner for Excellence in Opinion Writing in the Scripps Howard Awards for his coverage of systemic racism in the United States’ response to Covid-19 for the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) and Grist. His book “The Puffin Plan,” that chronicled the restoration of puffins to the coast of Maine, co-written with Steve Kress, won the 2021 first-place Gold Award in Teen Nonfiction in the Independent Book Publishers Association Benjamin Franklin Awards. He was a 2001 Pulitzer finalist “for his perceptive, versatile columns on such subjects as politics, education and race” for the Boston Globe. Jackson is a 10-time contest winner from the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ), most recently in 2017 for an essay on the late Muhammad Ali. Jackson is a native of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and 1976 graduate of the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee. He holds three honorary degrees, from the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts, Salem State University and the Episcopal Divinity School.

Autumn Jones is a multimedia journalist and fellow at Inside Climate News. She is a senior at the University of Texas at Austin where she studies Journalism and Science Communications. Aside from writing, Jones is a photojournalist and has worked as a freelance photographer for over seven years. She has a passion for climate change, environmental justice, space and public health. She has received awards for her journalistic work ranging from the Dallas Morning News to the Emmys. When she isn’t covering science, she can be found serving as the communications contractor for the Carrollton-Farmers Branch Educational Foundation non-profit in her home city of Dallas.

Michael Kodas, of Boulder, Colorado, is the author of Megafire: The Race to Extinguish a Deadly Epidemic of Flame, which won the 2018 Colorado Book Award for General Nonfiction and was named one of the 20 best nonfiction books of 2017 by Amazon. He is also the author of High Crimes: The Fate of Everest in an Age of Greed, which was named Best Non-Fiction in USA Book News’ National Best Books Awards of 2008 and was the subject of a question on the game show Jeopardy!. He is the former Deputy Director of the Center for Environmental Journalism at the University of Colorado Boulder. As a photojournalist at The Hartford Courant he was part of the team awarded the Pulitzer Prize for breaking news coverage in 1999. He has also been honored with awards from the Pictures of Year International competition, the Society of Professional Journalists, the Lowell Thomas Travel Journalism Competition and the National Press Photographers Association. His work has appeared in the New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The Chicago Tribune, The Boston Globe, The Denver Post, Newsweek, the Ken Burns/Lynn Novick documentary The Vietnam War and many other print, online and broadcast outlets.

Ally Korony is the grants officer for Inside Climate News. Her previous fundraising experience includes roles with YWCA Central Carolinas and Neighborhood Housing Services of New Haven (a NeighborWorks America affiliate), where she managed the grant writing and donor relations processes. Originally from Saranac Lake, New York, Ally currently resides in New Haven, Connecticut.

Nicholas Kusnetz is a reporter for Inside Climate News. Before joining ICN, he worked at the Center for Public Integrity and ProPublica. His work has won numerous awards, including from the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Society of American Business Editors and Writers, and has appeared in more than a dozen publications, including The Washington Post, Businessweek, The Nation, Fast Company and The New York Times. You can reach Nicholas at nicholas.kusnetz@insideclimatenews.org.

Marianne Lavelle is a reporter for Inside Climate News. She has covered environment, science, law, and business in Washington, D.C. for more than two decades. She has won the Polk Award, the Investigative Editors and Reporters Award, and numerous other honors. Lavelle spent four years as online energy news editor and writer at National Geographic. She spearheaded a project on climate lobbying for the nonprofit journalism organization, the Center for Public Integrity. She also has worked at U.S. News and World Report magazine and The National Law Journal. While there, she led the award-winning 1992 investigation, “Unequal Protection,” on the disparity in environmental law enforcement against polluters in minority and white communities. Lavelle received her master’s degree from Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, and is a graduate of Villanova University.

Vernon Loeb is the executive editor of Inside Climate News. He joined ICN from The Atlantic, where he was politics editor, after a newspaper career as a reporter, foreign correspondent and editor. He was California investigations editor at the Los Angeles Times, deputy managing editor for news at The Philadelphia Inquirer, metro editor at The Washington Post, and managing editor at the Houston Chronicle.  He began his reporting career at the Inquirer covering the Delaware legislature and became the newspaper’s Southeast Asia correspondent, which took him to Beijing during the Tiananmen Square uprising. Later, as Pentagon correspondent at the Post, he covered the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. On his watch, the Inquirer was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in national reporting, the Times was a finalist in investigative reporting, and the Chronicle won the Pulitzer Prize for commentary and was twice a finalist for public service and breaking news.

Moriah McDonald is a second year master’s student studying journalism at University of Missouri-Columbia. Previously, Moriah earned her bachelor’s degree in English literature and her minor in communication studies from Andrews University. Since reading literature about climate change in undergrad, Moriah has interned for the sustainability company SolarFi and is currently working on her master’s research project, which centers around understanding how climate change journalists frame climate change to the general public. Moriah has previous experience working as a news and feature story writer for University Communication and a news editor for the Student Movement newspaper at Andrews University.

Phil McKenna is a Boston-based reporter for Inside Climate News. Before joining ICN in 2016, he was a freelance writer covering energy and the environment for publications including The New York Times, Smithsonian, Audubon and WIRED. Uprising, a story he wrote about gas leaks under U.S. cities, won the AAAS Kavli Science Journalism Award and the 2014 NASW Science in Society Award. Phil has a master’s degree in science writing from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and was an Environmental Journalism Fellow at Middlebury College.

Wyatt Myskow covers environmental news in the Western U.S. from Phoenix as the Roy W. Howard investigative fellow. Wyatt graduated from Arizona State University with his bachelor’s degree in journalism and has previously reported for The Arizona Republic, The Chronicle of Higher Education and The State Press. He has covered local government, development news, education issues and the COVID-19 pandemic.

Emma Peterson is an Arizona-based intern at Inside Climate News. Emma will be graduating in the fall with a master’s degree in investigative journalism from the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University. She went to the University of Arizona for undergrad and received a bachelor’s degree in global journalism and a minor in natural resources. She has experience in the water treatment industry and special interests in western ecosystems and toxicology.

Martha Pskowski covers climate change and the environment in Texas from her base in El Paso. She was previously an environmental reporter at the El Paso Times. She began her career as a freelance journalist in Mexico, reporting for outlets including The Guardian and Yale E360. Martha has a B.A. in Environmental Studies from Hampshire College and a master’s degree in Journalism and Latin American Studies from New York University. She is a former Fulbright research fellow in Mexico.

Lucie Rochat is the Development and Operations Coordinator at Inside Climate News. Before joining ICN, she worked as a Development Intern for the Aspen Institute’s Energy and Environment Program, where she was introduced to environmental philanthropy. She also has experience interning for the Office of Sustainability Integration at Middlebury College, as well as for Verité, a global nonprofit. Lucie graduated from Middlebury College with a bachelor’s degree in political science and a minor in mathematics. She lives in Washington, D.C.

Sonya Ross is the managing editor of Inside Climate News. She is also the founder and editor-in-chief of Black Women Unmuted, a media start-up that reports untold and under-told stories about Black women in the U.S.

Sonya launched BWU in 2019 after a 33-year career at The Associated Press that took her on assignment to 48 countries and all 50 states. She became The AP’s first Black woman White House reporter in 1995 and, in 1999, the first Black woman elected to the board of the White House Correspondents Association. Sonya was the print pool reporter aboard Air Force One with President George W. Bush as he was evacuated during the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, also a historic first.

An Atlanta native, Sonya began her career in 1985, studying for her B.A. in journalism by day at Georgia State University, and working as a library clerk for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution newspaper at night. The AP hired her as an intern in 1986 and quickly moved her into political reporting. Sonya distinguished herself covering the Georgia Legislature, the 1988 Democratic National Convention, Maynard Jackson’s 1989 comeback mayoral bid and the 1990 Georgia governor’s race between Zell Miller and Andrew Young. She joined AP’s Washington-based national reporting staff after the 1992 Los Angeles riots, covering civil rights and urban affairs. Beyond reporting roles, Sonya was an editor for AP on foreign affairs and national security, and domestic regional coverage. In 2010, she established specialty race & ethnicity coverage for AP that, over the next nine years, transformed the media’s approach to gathering news for and about people of color.

In 2018, Sonya was inducted into the Society of Professional Journalists Hall of Fame. She was the founding chair of the political reporting task force for the National Association of Black Journalists, serving from 2010-2019. She currently serves on the boards of the Journalism & Women’s Symposium, the Washington Press Club Foundation, the SPJ Foundation and the National Newspaper Publishers Association Fund, and is a member of Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Inc.

David Sassoon is the founder and publisher of Inside Climate News. He has been a writer, editor and publisher for 30 years, involved with public interest issues: human rights, cultural preservation, healthcare, education and the environment. In 2003 he began researching the business case for climate action for the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. BusinessWeek used that research to help it rank the Top Ten Companies of the Decade for emissions reductions and to produce a multi-part project that examined how leading U.S. corporations were responding to climate change. As an outgrowth of his research, Sassoon founded a blog in 2007 which has grown and evolved into Inside Climate News. He earned his undergraduate degree from Harvard University and a master’s degree from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism.

Erin Schulte is an editor and writer based in Washington, D.C. Before coming to Inside Climate News, she was a senior editor at Fast Company and at Hearst Magazines Digital Media, and was a reporter and columnist for The Wall Street Journal, covering the U.S. equities market for WSJ.com. She was also the executive editor for Huge, the Brooklyn-based digital agency. She began her career as a city hall reporter at The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette in Little Rock, and has also worked at newspapers in Nebraska, Washington, Michigan, and Iowa. She served for three years on the board of directors of the Center for Public Integrity, the Pulitzer-prize winning nonprofit investigative organization based in Washington, D.C. A South Dakota native, she has a degree in journalism from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

Kristoffer Tigue is a New York City-based reporter for Inside Climate News, where he covers environmental justice issues, writes the Today’s Climate newsletter and manages ICN’s social media. His work has been published in Reuters, Scientific American, Public Radio International and CNBC. Tigue holds a Master’s degree in journalism from the Missouri School of Journalism, where his feature writing won several Missouri Press Association awards.

Katelyn Weisbrod is the Audience Director at Inside Climate News based in Minnesota. She previously wrote ICN’s weekly Warming Trends column highlighting climate-related studies, innovations, books, cultural events and other developments from the global warming frontier. She joined the team in January 2020 after graduating from the University of Iowa with Bachelor’s degrees in journalism and environmental science. Katelyn previously reported from Kerala, India, as a Pulitzer Center student fellow, and worked for over four years at the University of Iowa’s student newspaper, The Daily Iowan.