Bajak briefed National Press Foundation fellows in January 2022: How Data Journalists Track Politics.

Aleszu Bajak is a senior data reporter on USA TODAY’s data team, part of the newspaper’s national investigative unit. He is a former Knight Science Journalism Fellow at M.I.T., was a founding senior writer at Undark magazine and founding editor of Esquire Classic, a project resuscitating the magazine’s archives. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, M.I.T. Technology Review and Nature.

Before USA TODAY, he spent several years teaching and managing the graduate programs at Northeastern University’s School of Journalism where he launched Storybench.org, an under the hood guide to digital and data storytelling. He also served as innovation lead at the Co-Laboratory for Data Impact within Northeastern while teaching courses in journalism, coding and data visualization. He’s also the founder of LatinAmericanScience.org, a resource for science news and opinion out of Latin America, which he started in Argentina in 2012.

In 2013, Bajak was awarded a Knight Science Journalism Fellowship at M.I.T. where he explored the interface between journalists, designers and developers between visits to the Muddy Charles. Since then, he has taught journalism courses and led workshops at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard, Brandeis University, Harvard Extension School, Boston University’s Storytelling with Data Bootcamp and O’Reilly Media. He has spoken at conferences in Seoul, Toulouse, San Antonio, Bogotá and Querétaro.

He has been a freelance reporter in Latin America, a producer for the public radio show Science Friday and worked in the gene therapy department at Weill Cornell.