Aleszu Bajak is the co-winner of the 2022 NPF Innovative Storytelling Award, along with with Ramon Padilla, for their story titled “‘Hope’ is out, ‘fight’ is in: Does tweeting divide Congress, or simply echo its division?”

Aleszu Bajak is the director of data visualization at the Urban Institute. Previously, he was 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, and served as innovation lead for the Co-Laboratory for Data Impact. He’s also the founder of LatinAmericanScience.org, a resource for science news and opinion out of Latin America, and is a former producer of the radio show Science Friday.