MERRILL - Key Persons
Job Titles:
- Adjunct Lecturer
- Journalist
Abbie Bennett is an award-winning journalist covering energy, environment and Capitol Hill for international news service S&P Global.
Bennett previously covered Congress, veterans affairs and defense for CBS Radio. Before covering Congress, she was a reporter and online producer for The News & Observer and other McClatchy newspapers in North Carolina, where she covered local and state government, and led the real-time news team, generating millions of readers for McClatchy nationally. She also worked at newspapers in Charlotte, Greenville, Fayetteville and Fort Bragg, North Carolina, and lectured for journalism classes at the University of North Carolina and East Carolina University.
Adam Longo, a Merrill College alum, is the Emmy-nominated evening news anchor for Washington's CBS affiliate station, WUSA9.
He has worked as a reporter and anchor for television stations in Virginia, Tennessee and Florida. Longo was most recently at the CBS station in Phoenix, Arizona.
Job Titles:
- Director, Capital News Service Digital Bureau
- Journalist and Graphic Designer
Adam Marton is an award-winning journalist and graphic designer who joined the Philip Merrill College of Journalism in 2018 after 13 years at The Baltimore Sun.
Marton is focused on quality storytelling across media, using design and technology to tell rich, human stories. He is a visual journalist and designer specializing in the presentation of the news, including data visualization, front-end development and information graphics.
At Merrill College, Marton oversees the digital bureau of Capital News Service, a student-run news organization within Merrill College. He also teaches journalists design, coding and data skills with real-world newsroom applications.
Marton formerly worked at The Baltimore Sun as the senior editor of data and graphics. He led a design and development team focused on the creation of graphics, data visualization and editorial presentation. He designed many projects for The Sun, including "The 45 Minute Mystery of Freddie Gray's Death," which was a 2015 Pulitzer Prize finalist, as well as "Shoot to Kill" and "Bridging the Divide," both finalists in the 2017 Online Journalism Awards.
Marton is a graduate of Towson University and the University of Baltimore's publication design graduate program. He is a native Marylander and has lived in Baltimore City for nearly 20 years.
Job Titles:
- Interim Director, Capital News Service Annapolis Bureau Retired ( Director, Internships and Career Development Senior Lecturer )
Adrianne Flynn was Merrill College's internships and career development director until retiring at the end of 2021.
She first came to the college since 1999, and ran both the Annapolis and Washington, D.C., bureaus of Capital News Service.
During her long career as a reporter, she covered nearly every beat at news outlets in four states, but specialized in politics and public policy. She ended her reporting career as a Washington correspondent for The Arizona Republic.
Delfino, a 2015 Merrill College alum and a Merrill adjunct lecturer since 2017, joined the college's faculty as a broadcast lecturer in 2022. She was previously a multiplatform photojournalist and editor for TEGNA's national VERIFY team. She produced daily and long-form, data-driven content for local news stations around the country. Before that, she was a photojournalist at Baltimore's Fox 45, where she specialized in producing daily news, under deadline, with a creative storytelling approach.
As a member of Merrill College's adjunct faculty, she taught an intermediate news reporting class to undergraduate students.
As an instructor, her goal is to educate students on the simple knowledge that quality video, crisp natural sound and subjective soundbites will lead to a well-rounded story. Delfino credits much of her success to professional mentors and hopes to be the same guiding light for her students.
Delfino's work is nationally and locally recognized. She was the NPPA 2017 and 2018 East Top Photographer of the Year and a finalist for NPPA's National Television News Photographer of the Year. She's earned 12 NATAS regional Emmys and CAPBA's 2020 Outstanding News Photographer award.
When she's not teaching or in a deep edit, Delfino enjoys taking long road trips to Florida with her fiancé Tom and dog Macro.
Job Titles:
- Adjunct Lecturer
- Sports Reporter
Alex Flum is a sports reporter and anchor with WDVM-TV, focused on covering high school, college and professional sports in the Washington, D.C., area. He is a proud 2018 Merrill College graduate. Flum previously worked as a sports anchor/reporter at WHSV, the ABC affiliate in Harrisonburg, Virginia. He is currently teaching JOUR 262: News Videography.
As a student at the University of Maryland, he co-created the The Left Bench TV and broadcasted for the Big Ten Network, WMUC Sports and Capital News Service, and wrote for The Diamondback. He held internships with NBC4 and ABC7 in the Washington market, also working as a field producer with NBC4.
Flum was ranked twice as a top-20 collegiate sportscaster of the year by the Sportscasters Talent Agency of America and received The Shirley Povich Center for Sports Journalism's star student award. He was elected the Merrill College student commencement speaker by his fellow graduates for the Spring 2018 commencement.
Job Titles:
- Adjunct Lecturer
- Reporter for Newsy
Alex Miller is a political reporter for Newsy. She has spent the last four years covering all aspects of Washington.
Before her time at Newsy, Miller covered politics and the 2016 presidential campaign for Gray Television's Washington Bureau.
She began her on-air career at the Fox O&O in Charlotte, North Carolina. Miller is also a proud 2013 Merrill alum.
Job Titles:
- Director, Capital News Service Audience Engagement Bureau Lecturer
Alexander Pyles is a Philip Merrill College of Journalism lecturer and director of the audience engagement bureau for Capital News Service, the college's student-staffed news organization with bureaus and news teams in Annapolis, Baltimore, College Park and Washington, D.C.
He helps student journalists use metrics, social media and other digital storytelling tools to maximize the audience for projects published by CNS and the Howard Center for Investigative Journalism. He also teaches related courses on interactive design and social media strategy.
An award-winning journalist and teacher, Pyles joined Merrill College's full-time faculty in 2019 after teaching part time since 2012.
Previously, he was a reporter and editor for several news organizations.
Pyles was most recently an editor at The Baltimore Sun, where he managed coverage of the Maryland State House, Baltimore City Hall and elections. Before becoming The Sun's government and politics editor, he led coverage of the NFL as an editor in the newspaper's sports department.
Prior to that, Pyles was The (Maryland) Daily Record‘s State House reporter; a reporter, editor and photojournalist for AOL's Patch.com; and a sportswriter for The (Wilmington, Del.) News Journal, CBS Sports, Inside Lacrosse and other publications.
In 2018, he received the Philip Merrill Presidential Scholars Program Faculty Mentor award.
Pyles holds a master's degree in journalism from Merrill College and bachelor's degrees in English and media and communication studies from UMBC.
Job Titles:
- Program Coordinator for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion
- UMD Philip Merrill College of Journalism 's Program Coordinator for Diversity
Alexis Ojeda-Brown became the UMD Philip Merrill College of Journalism's program coordinator for diversity, equity and inclusion in Spring 2023.
Ojeda-Brown had worked at the Baltimore Museum of Industry since 2019 on diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, and marketing projects. Among other accomplishments, she researched, designed and tested text panels for new displays highlighting stories of underrepresented workers within various Baltimore Industries. She also worked as a museum educator at the museum from 2018-20.
Since 2020, she was a program and education coordinator at Morgan State University's Lillie Carroll Jackson Civil Rights Museum, where she designed a civil rights curriculum for Baltimore City Public Schools.
Ojeda-Brown graduated with a B.A. from the University of Maryland with majors in English literature and history. She also holds an African-American Studies certificate from UMD.
Job Titles:
- Lecturer
- Broadcast Journalist
- Director of Merrill 's College Park Scholars Media
Broadcast journalist Alison Burns is a lecturer and Ph.D. student in the Philip Merrill College of Journalism.
Burns is the director of Merrill's College Park Scholars Media, Self and Society living and learning community, and served as a Merrill adjunct, teaching a variety of courses -- all while working on her Ph.D. in Journalism Studies.
In her first year directing the Merrill Scholars program, Burns was recognized with Scholars' Ken Joseph Outstanding Mentor Award after being nominated by her students.
Burns, who received her undergraduate degree from UMD in 1993, has worked in news since, mostly as a Washington correspondent and producer for Cox Media Group's nationwide network of TV and radio stations. As a Washington correspondent, she produced and reported multiple live reports a day from the U.S. Capitol, the White House and the Pentagon. She also covered major breaking news and investigative stories.
She continues to freelance as a producer, while teaching broadcast news writing and reporting, and other courses at the college.
Burns is also researching ways to improve and expand journalism education. She created a "FACTS about Fake News" media literacy workshop with the goal of empowering high school students and others to recognize the value of journalism and make the fight against "fake news" their own. The project received a 2019 Best Practices in Teaching Award from the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication.
She was selected as a 2017-2019 UMD Do Good Faculty Fellow to develop service-learning programs that help students improve community engagement on campus. She also received a Making a Difference Award from the UMD Office of Community Engagement for creating a class that partnered college journalism students with Prince George's County middle school students.
Andrea Koppel is a former award-winning CNN correspondent who spent 20 years as a journalist, the last 14 of them with CNN. During her time at CNN, she worked as a foreign correspondent in Japan and China, and as a State Department correspondent, traveling the globe for eight years with three secretaries of state. She also worked as CNN's Capitol Hill correspondent for about 18 months.
However, in August 2007, her contract with CNN wasn't renewed. That's when Koppel began her Goldilocks-like experience of tasting different bowls of porridge and subsequently, pivoted to her second industry: public relations in 2008. That bowl was a little too cold and so a couple of years later, in 2010, she moved to her third industry: nonprofits, and headed up international communications at the American Red Cross. In 2011, she decided that bowl of porridge was too hot and zagged into public affairs, also in the nonprofit world, and joined global humanitarian and development organization Mercy Corps as vice president of global engagement and policy.
Most recently, in 2017, Koppel quit the nonprofit world to be a full-time mom and discovered the world of podcasting. She is currently the host of the Time4Coffee podcast, which influenced her next industry pivot: career coaching for college students, which she began in earnest in 2020. Today, she is the founder and CEO of College2Career Clarity, an educational technology startup.
With the new pilot "career clarity" course at Merrill College, Koppel is dipping her toe into her fifth or sixth industry, depending upon how you qualify them: Ed Tech entrepreneur. Koppel earned her B.A. from Middlebury College in Political Science, Asian Studies and Mandarin Chinese. She is also the mother of a self-described "angsty" high school junior.
Job Titles:
- Adjunct Lecturer
- Journalist
Anne Farris Rosen has been a journalist since 1980, specializing in coverage of politics, government, legal affairs and social issues at the international, national and local levels. Based in Washington, D.C., she worked for The New York Times, The Washington Post, BBC and Pew Research Center, in addition to newspapers in North Carolina, Missouri and Arkansas. She also is coauthor of "Deep South Dispatch: Memoir of a Civil Rights Journalist" with former New York Times correspondent John Herbers.
She has contributed to websites maintained by the Pew Research Center and the Center for Public Integrity. Rosen has also worked as an off-camera reporter for London-based documentary film production companies and written books published by Simon & Schuster. She currently is editing a book on the civil rights movement, and is a Domestic Print Finalist Judge for the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Awards.
Ben Worsley teaches JOUR 262 at the Philip Merrill College of Journalism. Worsley is the chief photojournalist at WBFF in Baltimore, where he hires, coaches and mentors the station's 21 video editors and photojournalists.
Worsley has traveled all over the country telling stories for WBFF for more than a decade. He has won multiple AP, Emmy, Murrow, NPPA and Telly awards for the work he's produced. He is a proud University of Maryland alum and Baltimore native.
Expertise: Photojournalism; video storytelling; broadcast journalism; television; multimedia; media innovation; women in media; social media; Snapchat; video training; implementing format transitions and new technology; network political coverage; national campaign trail; covering political conventions; hands-on journalism education; blended learning; active and student-centered classrooms.
Bill Parker is the chief engineer for UMTV, the Philip Merrill College of Journalism's cable TV station.
Job Titles:
- Adjunct Lecturer
- Producer at NBC4 Washington
Brandon A. Benavides is a content producer at NBC4 Washington. He currently serves on the board of SAG-AFTRA Washington-Mid-Atlantic Local.
He served as president of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists from 2016-18. The Emmy-winning journalist has more than 15 years of experience in broadcast news. He previously taught at the University of Texas at Tyler.
Benavides earned his master's degree in Communication: Journalism and Public Affairs at American University in Washington, D.C., and his bachelor's in communication from St. Edward's University in Austin, Texas.
Job Titles:
- Program Coordinator of Undergraduate Recruitment
Job Titles:
- Adjunct Lecturer
- Editor at the Washington Post
Brian Cleveland is a multiplatform editor at The Washington Post. He edits stories for online and print and helps manage The Post stylebook, among other duties.
Prior to that, he was copy desk chief at The Virginian-Pilot and a copy editor at the Duluth News Tribune in Minnesota.
Job Titles:
- Adjunct Lecturer
- Senior Digital Analyst at NPR
Brittany Cheng is a senior digital analyst at NPR, where she oversees news insights strategy. In a nutshell, she's responsible for helping senior leaders better understand how to attract and retain diverse audiences, and for empowering editors and reporters to use analytics to amplify the impact of their journalism. Her work also includes shaping the newsroom's role in the audience funnel, training staff and thinking about what's next for journalism.
Cheng came to NPR after a five-year run at Vox Media, where she specialized in audience habits for three of their signature brands: SB Nation, Vox and Polygon. While on the central analytics team, she built personalized dashboards, analyzed the effects of product rollouts, evangelized evergreen, experimented with consumer revenue and measured audience loyalty. In 2017, she also helped organize the largest digital media union in history and served as Vox Media Union's first labor chair.
Cheng is a 2016 alumna of Merrill College and The Diamondback, where she helped the paper make the transition to going paperless as their first director of digital strategy.
Job Titles:
- Adjunct Lecturer
- Reporter at the Washington Post
Brittany Mayes is a graphics reporter at The Washington Post, mainly covering politics, sports and breaking news. Before joining The Post in June 2018, she worked at NPR on the visuals team as a news apps developer.
She graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2016 and attended The New York Times Student Journalism Institute in the same year. She is an executive mentor in the Online News Association Student Newsroom and works with the Press Pass Mentors organization.
Job Titles:
- Professor of the Practice Emerita
Carol L. Rogers retired from the Philip Merrill College of Journalism in 2014 and became the first Professor of the Practice Emerita in Merrill College history in August 2015.
A former head of the Office of Communications for the American Association for the Advancement of Science, she specialized in science journalism, in particular media coverage of climate change, and women in the media. She is on the Editorial Advisory Board of the international social science journal Science Communication, for which she served as editor for nine years.
A fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, she served two terms on the Committee on the Public Understanding of Science and Technology and served as chair and council delegate for the AAAS Section on General Interest in Science and Engineering. She has coedited two books, "Communicating Uncertainty: Media Coverage of New and Controversial Science" and "Scientists and Journalists: Reporting Science as News."
Rogers has served on the boards of the Council for the Advancement of Science Writing and of the National Association of Science Writers, of which she is a life member.
Carole Lee served as editor and publisher of city magazines in southern markets both before and after completing her M.A. in Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She defended her dissertation to complete her Ph.D. at the University of Maryland in 2022.
Her professional experience also includes a stint as press secretary for a U.S. Senator and five years directing communications for The Academy for Health Services Research and Health Policy, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank that seeks to inform and influence health policy initiatives at local, state and national levels.
Throughout her work in journalism and communications, Lee has maintained a strong interest in understanding how media influence and reflect their cultural contexts. Her academic work includes an extensive study of the coverage of evangelist Billy Graham throughout the first forty years of his career.
Her ongoing research interests include the relationship between media and religion, the role of free media in the development and survival of democracy, and the history and significance of the changing nature of media delivery and consumption.
Job Titles:
- Retired ( Broadcast Lecturer )
Cassandra Clayton taught broadcast writing and reporting courses at Merrill College. She also served as director of the Capital News Service Broadcast Bureau.
Hired as an NBC News correspondent in 1983, over the next two decades she reported from their Atlanta, Chicago, New York and Washington, D.C., bureaus. She coanchored a nightly news and talk program on CNBC called "The Real Story," and substitute anchored Nightly News Weekend Edition, Sunrise and the Today news segment.
Prior to coming to the University of Maryland, she most recently reported and anchored for MSNBC and taught broadcast journalism at Howard University.
Job Titles:
- Digital Editor for the Washington Post
- Director of Assessments Director of the Graduate Multimedia Certificate Program Senior Lecturer
Chris Harvey has worked as digital editor for The Washington Post, a magazine managing editor, a political reporter and a journalism teacher.
In her earliest positions at the Philip Merrill College of Journalism, she directed the student-staffed Capital News Service bureaus in Annapolis and Washington, and launched and directed the multimedia news bureau in College Park. She currently serves as director of assessments (helping to oversee curriculum development), oversees a weekend graduate multimedia certificate program, and teaches courses in reporting and editing.
Harvey, who graduated with honors in 1980 with a B.S. degree from the College of Journalism, spent the first 12 years of her career reporting on local, state and national politics for publications in the Washington metropolitan area, including The Washington Times. She returned to the college in 1992 to edit and direct the Annapolis and Washington CNS bureaus. In the mid-1990s, she was hired part time and later full time at The Washington Post's digital newsroom in Northern Virginia, where she worked as a Metro editor overseeing breaking news and digital projects.
She returned to the college in 1998 to serve as the managing editor of American Journalism Review, a national magazine that reported on the news industry. But two years later, she shifted back to teaching full time. She built a multimedia newsroom and launched a website in 2001 fed by student stories, which she edited and directed for 10 years as part of the Capital News Service program. The site and its stories won numerous national and regional awards. She also created courses in web production and multimedia storytelling, for both undergraduate and graduate students.
For two summers, in 2009 and 2010, Harvey worked as managing editor of the award-winning News21 multimedia projects at the University of Maryland, funded by grants from the Carnegie-Knight Initiative on the Future of Journalism Education: Bay on the Brink and The New Voters. She later taught health reporting capstone classes in a partnership with the nonprofit Kaiser Health News; students reported on the prevalence of teen athlete concussions and the wide-ranging impacts of moving mentally ill patients out of institutions without the necessary support. Those projects were published on CNS.
She currently serves as director of assessments for the college and helps to recruit and oversee part-time faculty teaching reporting and editing courses. In addition, she oversees a weekend multimedia certificate program for master's students. She chaired the graduate curriculum subcommittee that crafted a curriculum overhaul approved by the faculty in 2011, and more recently chairs the full committee, working with the associate dean on updates to curriculum.
Besides her work at American Journalism Review, The Washington Post and The Washington Times, Harvey has freelanced for Congressional Quarterly's "Politics in America." For more information, see her LinkedIn and Twitter pages.
Expertise
Reporting and editing for websites, social media, magazines and newspapers.
Job Titles:
- Assistant Professor in Race and Media
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor
- Contributing Editor of Columbia Journalism Review
- Reporter for Time
Christopher Hanson worked for 20 years as a reporter for Time, The Washington Star, Reuters and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, focusing on topics such as presidential politics, Congress, the environment, American diplomacy and military affairs. Hanson was a combat correspondent in the Gulf War and covered the civil war in Rwanda.
He joined the Philip Merrill College of Journalism in 1999 after earning a Ph.D. in Mass Communication from the University of North Carolina under a Freedom Forum Fellowship and an M.A. in political theory and moral philosophy in 1984 from Oxford University. His research interests include journalism ethics, the role of master narratives and stereotypes in shaping news content, and media-military relations.
A contributing editor of Columbia Journalism Review, Hanson has published over 80 articles in CJR, as well as opinion pieces in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, The New Republic and elsewhere. He has discussed the news media on National Public Radio, C-SPAN and other broadcast and cable outlets.
Job Titles:
- Lecturer
- Freelance Writer and Former Group News Director for the Sinclair Broadcast Group
Cindy Wright is a freelance writer and former group news director for the Sinclair Broadcast Group.
Job Titles:
- Director of Computer Services
Clint Bucco oversees the college's computer laboratories and the computers used in offices in Knight Hall, and he provides software and technical support to the college's faculty and staff.
He also maintains the local journalism servers and networks, including those for UMTV, Capital News Service and the college's affiliated journalism centers.
Constance Mitchell Ford, a 1977 University of Maryland graduate, is a financial journalist who spent more than three decades covering economics, banking, investing and real estate.
Most of those years were spent at The Wall Street Journal in New York, most recently as the Global Real Estate and Property Bureau Chief. In that role, she managed a team of reporters who wrote about the business and investing aspects of residential and commercial real estate, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac; mortgage-backed securities; the housing market and home builders; hotels, office and retail real estate; the real estate holdings of pension funds and investment firms; and Real Estate Investment Trusts.
Under her leadership, reporters in the real estate group won dozens of journalism awards and Ford personally received the Scripps Howard National Journalism Award for business and economics reporting in 2007 for stories about the subprime mortgage crisis.
Prior to that position, Ford held numerous other positions at The Wall Street Journal, including economics editor and senior reporter covering credit markets and investment banking.
A native of Washington, D.C., Ford has been invited to speak about the economy and real estate at numerous national and international events, including the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland; The Global Interdependence Center Conference in Dublin, Ireland; The International Festival of Arts & Ideas in New Haven, Conn., the Global Summit of Women in Seoul, Korea, among others.
She received an undergraduate degree in Journalism from the University of Maryland and a graduate degree in Economics from the State University of New York at Stony Brook.
Expertise: Intelligence; military; cybersecurity; international freedom of the press issues; U.S. human rights policy. A two-time Pulitzer Prize winner and three-time finalist, Priest uncovered secret CIA prisons in Eastern Europe and deplorable conditions for veterans at the Walter Reed Medical Center in Washington. Her student-led Press Uncuffed project successfully focused attention on the plight of journalists who are jailed around the world.
Danae Johnson joined the UMD Philip Merrill College of Journalism's business office as a program manager in Spring 2023. She is responsible for travel, payroll and onboarding for Merrill College.
She started at UMD in 2018 as the facilities coordinator for the University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies, where she worked until early 2022. Johnson then managed all state, Designated Research Initiative Fund and foundation accounts for the UMD physics department.
Johnson earned her bachelor's degree in communication studies from Rutgers University-New Brunswick.
Job Titles:
- Adjunct Lecturer
- Reporter at the Washington Post
David Betancourt is a comic book culture reporter at The Washington Post. The 2020-21 school year marked his first as an adjunct lecturer at the University of Maryland Philip Merrill College of Journalism, where he teaches the comic book culture/reporting class.
He earned a bachelor's degree in Media Studies from Radford University in 2002.
David Lightman, a 1971 University of Maryland graduate, is the chief congressional correspondent for McClatchy Newspapers. A former managing editor of The Diamondback, he has also worked at The (Baltimore) Evening Sun, where he covered the Maryland General Assembly, and was Washington bureau chief for the Hartford Courant from 1984 to 2007.
He is a member of the Gridiron Club and is current chairman of Congress' Standing Committee of Correspondents. He has taught at the University of Maryland since 1994.
Job Titles:
- Adjunct Lecturer
- Sports Anchor and Reporter
Dave Owens is a sports anchor and reporter for WUSA 9 in Washington, D.C., covering everything from the Washington football team to NCAA basketball to local high school sports. He also hosts Game On! Overtime on Sunday nights at 11:30 p.m.
Owens came to D.C. after two years in Shreveport, Louisiana, where he covered the LSU Tigers, Arkansas Razorbacks, New Orleans Saints, Dallas Cowboys and multiple local universities and high schools. Before working in Shreveport, Owens was the weekend sports anchor in Redding, California. Owens grew up a multisport athlete in Southfield, Michigan, but he is no stranger to the D.C. area. He played football for two seasons at the Naval Academy and served in the United States Navy for six years. He also received his master's degree in Business Administration from the University of Redlands (California) in 2001.
Job Titles:
- Adjunct Lecturer
- Writer and Columnist for Sporting News
A professional sports journalist for more than 35 years, David Steele has been a writer and columnist for Sporting News, The Baltimore Sun, the San Francisco Chronicle, Newsday, The National Sports Daily and the New York Post, among other publications. He has contributed to ESPN's The Undefeated, The Crisis, The Grio and the Washington City Paper, as well as WEAA-FM, WYPR-FM and WNST-FM in Baltimore and WFAN-AM in New York.
He is the co-author of "Silent Gesture: The Autobiography of Tommie Smith," which was nominated for an NAACP Image Award, and of "Four Generations of Color," the autobiography of pioneering baseball scout and sports agent Miles McAfee.
He has won awards from the National Association of Black Journalists, the Association of Black Media Workers, the Associated Press Sports Editors, the Maryland-Delaware-D.C. Press Association, the Chesapeake Associated Press, the California News Publishers Association, the Florida Sportswriters Association and the Society of Professional Journalists. His stories have been cited twice in the annual Best American Sports Writing anthology.
He serves on the advisory board for The Shirley Povich Center for Sports Journalism at Merrill College.
Job Titles:
- Dean
- Dean Professor
- Expert
Dean Lucy Dalglish is a world-renowned expert on issues related to the First Amendment and Freedom of the Press and can also talk about trends in journalism.
Expertise: First Amendment rights; government transparency; secret courts; reporters' privilege; media/communications law; press freedom. She has been a national leader in supporting open meeting and open records laws at the state and federal level, as well as a key player in the effort to pass state and federal reporters' "shield laws."
Job Titles:
- Professor of Investigative Journalism
- Pulitzer Prize - Winning Journalist
Deborah Nelson is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who joined the Merrill College faculty in 2006 after five years as the Washington investigations editor for the Los Angeles Times. Before that, she reported for The Washington Post, The Seattle Times and the Chicago Sun-Times.
Nelson co-authored a Pulitzer-winning series in Seattle that exposed widespread corruption and inequities in a program designed to provide decent housing to thousands of Native American families on reservations around the U.S.
She co-edited Pulitzer-winning series at the L.A. Times on the deadly accident record of the Marine Harrier, and at The Post on the deaths of more than 200 children under the watch of child protective services.
Since joining Merrill College, she has co-authored articles for Reuters that examined income inequality, climate change, antibiotic resistance and military housing conditions. The articles won national awards, including from the Society of Professional Journalists, National Academies of Sciences, American Association for the Advancement of Science, White House Correspondents' Association and National Press Club.
Her critically acclaimed book, "The War Behind Me" (Basic Books 2008), documents the coverup of U.S. war crimes in Vietnam and profiles the soldiers who tried to stop the atrocities.
Students in her investigative reporting course have produced their own award-winning work for Capital News Service and the Howard Center for Investigative Journalism. Recent projects on the pandemic, housing insecurity, jail suicides and plea-bargaining abuses were published on The Associated Press national wire and appeared on news sites nationwide.
Nelson has a J.D. from DePaul University College of Law and a B.S. in Journalism from Northern Illinois University. She also has a Graduate Certificate of Professional Studies in Multimedia Journalism from Merrill College.
Expertise: Narrative journalism; literary journalism; nonfiction storytelling; news feature writing in journalism; news coverage of racism; news coverage of the history of racism in America; news coverage of racism in journalism; U.S. race massacres and lynchings; Red Summer Reign of Terror; the history of the press in covering lynchings and massacres in U.S. history; narrative writing about Black history.
Originally from Bulgaria, Denitsa Yotova is an immigrant and a first-generation college graduate who first pursued higher education in the United States at the age of 26 following a nine-year career working aboard cruise ships and traveling around the world.
She received he bachelor's degree in Journalism and Media Studies (with a minor in Film Studies) in 2009, and earned her master's in 2014, also in JMS, from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV).
While at UNLV, she wrote for the student newspaper (formerly The Rebel Yell, currently The Scarlet & Gray Free Press) and the online news site for the Hank Greenspun School of Journalism and Media Studies (Virtual Rebel), along with contributions to local and state publications. In her last year as a master's student, she gave guest lectures and served as a graduate assistant, teaching an introductory course on the development of journalism and mass media. In addition, as a part-time instructor, she taught an upper-level visual communication course of her own design.
Job Titles:
- Lecturer in Data and Computational Journalism
Derek Willis, one of the nation's leading data journalists and an experienced educator, joined the Philip Merrill College of Journalism in Fall 2021 as a lecturer in data and computational journalism.
Willis came to Merrill College having spent 25 years winning awards at some of the top news outlets in the country. His latest stop was ProPublica, where he served as a news applications developer since 2015.
He previously held interactive journalism roles with The New York Times and The Washington Post, after working as a database reporter for The Washington Post, The Center for Public Integrity, Congressional Quarterly and The Palm Beach Post.
"Derek is a gifted investigative reporter and news applications developer who has played a critical role in shaping the modern practice of data journalism," said Sean Mussenden, data editor at the UMD Howard Center for Investigative Journalism and chair of the search committee. "It's hard to think of another journalist who has done more to democratize access to open-source data about Congress and elections. And he has a strong, inclusive vision for the future of data-journalism education."
Willis focuses on teaching the next generation of journalists how to use data in innovative and compelling ways. His hiring was made possible by a University of Maryland initiative to expand the use of data across disciplines.
Willis has significant classroom experience, having taught data- and investigative-journalism classes since 2004.
He has served as an adjunct lecturer and instructor at West Virginia University, The George Washington University, Merrill College, The University of Texas at Austin, Georgetown University, Northwestern University, American University and Washington Adventist University.
Willis has helped his news organizations win awards from the Online News Association, the Knight Foundation, Investigative Reporters & Editors, and the Society of Professional Journalists. He has also been recognized individually by the Global Editors Network and the Special Libraries Association.
Originally from Pennsylvania, he earned his bachelor's degree from the University of Pittsburgh in 1992 and has been an active member of IRE since 1995. He and his family have lived in the D.C. area since 1998.
Job Titles:
- Retired ( Baltimore Sun Distinguished Lecturer )
Job Titles:
- Adviser
- Professor Director of ADVANCE
Expertise: Gender issues in content, production, and audiences for media; history of journalism and journalism education; women war reporting; media ethics; alternative and feminist media.
Job Titles:
- Director of Ph.D. Studies Associate Professor
Dr. Rob Wells, a 2016 Ph.D. alum of Merrill College, returned to the university in the Spring 2022 semester after more than five years at the University of Arkansas, where he rose to the rank of associate professor and led Arkansas' journalism graduate program. He became the director of Ph.D. studies beginning in the Fall 2022 semester.
Wells has more than two decades of business journalism experience at The Associated Press, Bloomberg News and The Wall Street Journal.
While at Arkansas, Wells ran ArkansasCovid.com, a statewide daily data and news website reporting on the pandemic. He also partnered with Merrill's Howard Center for Investigative Journalism on multiple projects, including the award-winning "Nowhere To Go" homelessness investigation. Wells is the author of "The Enforcers: How Little-Known Trade Reporters Exposed the Keating Five and Advanced Business Journalism" (University of Illinois Press, 2019), and "The Insider: How the Kiplinger Newsletter Bridged Washington and Wall Street" (2022).
While working on his doctorate at Merrill, Wells created a business reporting capstone class. During the 2011-12 school year, he helped launch a business reporting program at the University of South Carolina while serving as a Reynolds Visiting Business Journalism Professor.
Job Titles:
- Eleanor Merrill Visiting Professor on the Future of Journalism
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- Retired ( Associate Professor
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- George Solomon Endowed Chair in Sports Journalism Director, the Shirley Povich Center for Sports Journalism Professor of the Practice
- Retired ( Professor of the Practice Director, Shirley Povich Center for Sports Journalism )
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- Director, Capital News Service Washington, D.C., Bureau Senior Lecturer
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- Visiting Professor on Press Freedom
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- Associate Professor Emeritus
Expertise: Video journalism; social media; documentary filmmaking; streaming media; broadcast innovation.
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- Communications Manager
- Contact Communications Manager
Josh Land, a longtime Baltimore-Washington area journalist and a 2004 graduate of the Philip Merrill College of Journalism, became the school's communications manager in 2019.
Land is responsible for the college's communications and marketing strategy, including its publications, website and social media accounts.
Land was previously the senior sports editor at The Baltimore Sun, where he led a staff of 15 writers and editors in producing award-winning digital and print coverage of professional, college and high school sports.
He joined The Sun in 2015 to direct the news organization's coverage of the Baltimore Orioles and Major League Baseball.
Before that, he was deputy managing editor for baseball coverage and lead writer covering the NFL's Baltimore Ravens at MASNsports.com, the news website attached to the regional television network co-owned by the Orioles and Washington Nationals.
Land started his journalism career as a reporter at the Carroll County Times in Westminster, Maryland, where he covered the Orioles and the Maryland football and basketball teams from 2004-12.
Job Titles:
- Assistant Dean, Undergraduate Studies
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- Assistant Director, the Shirley Povich Center for Sports Journalism
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- Director, Internships and Career Development Senior Lecturer
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- Director, Howard Center for Investigative Journalism
Expertise: Managing newsrooms and collaborations; investigative and breaking news coverage; multiplatform storytelling; journalism ethics; politics and government coverage.
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- Assistant Dean
- Chief Development Officer
Katie Aune is chief development officer and assistant dean for external relations at the Philip Merrill College of Journalism.
Aune, who joined the college in 2018, was development director for the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, where she led that nonprofit organization's fundraising efforts.
Previously, she raised money for the National Geographic Society and oversaw alumni engagement and annual giving for the Chicago-Kent College of Law at Illinois Institute of Technology.
Before moving into fundraising and development, Aune practiced law in Chicago.
She holds a J.D. from the University of Minnesota Law School and a Master of Laws in taxation from Northwestern University School of Law. She earned a B.A. from the University of Iowa.
Job Titles:
- Professor of the Practice
Expertise: The intersection of sports, race, politics and culture; the history of the Black athlete; sports journalism; sports.
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- Assistant Professor in Visual Communication
Expertise: Critical media and design studies; grassroots labor organizing; technology platforms and platform capitalism; alternative media/journalism; critical studies of race and representation; documentary filmmaking; ethnographic methods; innovations in journalism.
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- Retired ( Visiting Professor in Digital Innovation )
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- Associate Professor of English
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- Student Services Supervisor
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- Richard Eaton Chair of Broadcast Journalism
- Richard Eaton Professor of Broadcast Journalism
Expertise: Broadcast news; media and politics; journalism ethics and history; investigative journalism; scandal coverage. Feldstein is regularly quoted as a media analyst by leading outlets in the U.S. and abroad and has testified as an expert witness on First Amendment issues in court and before Congress.
Job Titles:
- George Solomon Endowed Chair in Sports Journalism Director, the Shirley Povich Center for Sports Journalism Professor of the Practice
Job Titles:
- Managing Director, Capital News Service
Expertise: Newsroom leadership; investigative journalism; local and national news coverage; sports journalism.
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- Director, Capital News Service Broadcast Bureau Lecturer
Expertise: Data mining; natural language processing; computational journalism; social media sensing.
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- Executive Assistant to the Dean
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- Broadcast Production Lecturer
Philip (Phil) Merrill combined publishing and public service throughout his career. Merrill was the owner and publisher of The Capital newspaper in Annapolis, The Maryland Gazette, Washingtonian magazine and four other area newspapers. He served as an assistant secretary-general of NATO in Brussels, as special assistant to the Deputy Secretary of State and as a member of the Department of Defense Policy Board. He represented the U.S. in negotiations on the Law of the Sea Conference, the International Telecommunications Union and various disarmament and exchange agreements with the Soviet Union. He died in June 2006.
In 2001, Merrill and his wife Eleanor donated $10 million to the University of Maryland for the journalism school and the school was renamed in his honor. The Merrill family has continued to play an active role in the school's development, with Ellie serving as the longtime chair of the Board of Visitors (now as chair emeritus) and daughter Cathy assuming a seat on the board in 2007.
The gift, which Merrill wanted to have an immediate impact, went to endowing faculty chairs, graduate fellowships, equipment and outreach for the college. Merrill said he wanted his gift to help the college "achieve its goal of being the very best in the nation."
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- Assistant Director for Undergraduate Studies
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- Associate Dean for Academic Affairs Director of the Master 's Program Senior Lecturer
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- Professor Emeritus Former Dean
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- Richard Eaton Chair of Broadcast Journalism
- Richard Eaton Professor of Broadcast Journalism
Expertise: Broadcast news; media and politics; journalism ethics and history; investigative journalism; scandal coverage. Feldstein is regularly quoted as a media analyst by leading outlets in the U.S. and abroad and has testified as an expert witness on First Amendment issues in court and before Congress.
Job Titles:
- Director, Capital News Service Annapolis Bureau Lecturer
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- Associate Professor
- Associate Professor Director, Ph.D. Studies Program
Expertise: Audience engagement and analytics; science and health communication; mobile journalism. Yaros' research is building a digital engagement theory to explain how new structures for digital information maximize engagement of users who seek, select and share digital information.
Job Titles:
- Professor and Senior Scholar
- Professor Senior Scholar
Expertise: Political communication and democratization. A major theme in her work is the way in which the traditional media and the Internet can support or subvert democracy in places as diverse as Russia, the United States, and the United Kingdom.
Job Titles:
- Data Editor, Howard Center for Investigative Journalism Senior Lecturer
Expertise: Data journalism; computational journalism; investigative reporting; data visualization; artificial intelligence.
Job Titles:
- Assistant Director, Graduate Studies
Serap D. Rada, Ph.D., is the assistant director of graduate studies for the Philip Merrill College of Journalism.
Previously, Rada was the Director of Global Communities, a living-learning program on campus dedicated to enhancing intercultural communication. She also taught in the Department of Government and Politics at the University of Maryland and worked as a private consultant before joining the Humphrey Program.
She conducted research as a Fulbright Fellow in Istanbul, Turkey, and as a National Science Foundation Fellow in South Korea. Her dissertation is "State Intervention in the Economy: Institutional Aspects of Incentive Regimes in Turkey and South Korea."
Rada speaks Turkish and Spanish.
Job Titles:
- Retired ( Capital News Service Broadcast Bureau Director Senior Lecturer )
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- Professor of Media and International Affairs Director, International Center for Media and the Public Agenda
Expertise: How the media are and should be covering the new Trump administration; journalism's role in American democracy; the continuing evolution of television news from Ed Murrow to Megyn Kelley.
Job Titles:
- Eleanor Merrill Visiting Professor on the Future of Journalism
Job Titles:
- Assistant Dean, Business Operations
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- Program Manager for Alumni Relations and Development