Here are the bios for the terrific group of 12 Howard Center for Investigative Journalism fellows at the University of Maryland's Philip Merrill College of Journalism.
Our returning fellows — Aidan Hughes, Mennatala Ibrahim, Cait Kelley, Adriana Navarro, April Quevedo and Caley Fox Shannon — are joined by Liam Bowman, Cat Murphy, Taylor Nichols, Ijeoma Opara, Haley Parsley and Tiasia Saunders.
Liam Bowman
Liam Bowman is a journalist and graduate student from Alexandria, Virginia. After earning a B.A. in English Literature, with a minor in German Language, from the University of Oregon in 2020, he began his journalism career as a reporting intern for the Fauquier Times, covering public safety and local politics. In 2022, Bowman received an investigative reporting award from the Virginia Press Association for an article uncovering a lawsuit brought against a local megachurch by a woman who, as a teen, had been sexually abused by one of the church’s pastors. Bowman has also covered Virginia state politics and transportation issues as a freelancer for the Loudoun Times-Mirror.
In addition to his work as a journalist, Bowman spent a year working as an English teacher in Berlin.
Drawn by the power of storytelling to expose injustice and make positive change, Bowman plans to pursue a career in investigative journalism, and looks forward to developing his writing and reporting skills at the Philip Merrill College of Journalism.
Aidan Hughes
Aidan Hughes is a graduate student with a background in data, politics, and peace and conflict studies. He earned a B.A. in International Studies and Creative Writing from Virginia Tech in 2017, followed by an M.A. in Conflict Transformation and Social Justice from Queen’s University Belfast. Hughes’ time in post-conflict Northern Ireland, coupled with his professional experience as a data scientist, fueled his interest in harnessing the strengths of both storytelling and data analysis to examine social issues.
He is excited to study data journalism to identify meaningful patterns across complex data sets while preserving the human context and nuance behind them. Hughes ultimately hopes to use a hybrid of quantitative and qualitative methods to report on political violence, disinformation and elections. In his free time, he enjoys backpacking, finding the best gluten-free food in Washington, D.C., and the emotional turmoil of cheering for the Hokies.
Mennatala Ibrahim
Mennatala (Menna) Ibrahim is an Egyptian American, Muslim woman that spent the majority of her formative years moving from one place to another across a post-9/11 America. Despite the diversity between each region, she was quickly introduced to what it meant to live in a world that misrepresented, marginalized and antagonized her intersecting identities. Ibrahim is a graduate student in the University of Maryland’s Howard Center for Investigative Journalism. She ultimately hopes to refine her reporting and storytelling skills to amplify the voices of marginalized people in the media. She also hopes to expand the reach of this field into communities like hers with limited participation.
In 2022, Ibrahim earned bachelor’s degrees in Communication and Community Health from the University of Maryland. The intersection between her undergraduate degrees, as well as her personal experiences and a 2021 science journalism internship at Science Magazine, spurred an interest in covering science and health through storytelling.
Cait Kelley
Cait Kelley grew up on a hobby farm with goats and horses outside of Northfield, Minnesota. But her studies and love of travel have taken her across the world to live, study and work in Chile, Tunisia and Spain. She studied political science and Hispanic studies as an undergrad at Oberlin College. After graduating in 2020, she spent two years teaching English in Basque Country in Spain, and then working as a special education paraprofessional and teacher in her hometown.
Even before turning to journalism, Kelley began to develop her interviewing skills. She completed an independent interview project during her time at Oberlin that highlighted the voices and experiences of 50 campus dining and custodial staff, and she presented her findings to the college president and administrators.
Then, in 2022, an internship with her local radio station, KYMN Radio, cemented her decision to pivot to journalism and apply to graduate programs. Kelley loves investigative and documentary podcasts, such as "This Land" from Crooked Media and "The Trojan Horse Affair" from The New York Times and Serial Productions. She is motivated by highlighting underrepresented voices and figuring out the truth, whatever that may be. She’s excited to develop her investigative skills at the Philip Merrill College of Journalism as a Howard fellow and dreams of one day being on an investigative podcasting team.
Cat Murphy
Cat Murphy is a graduate student, data nerd and longtime political news junkie from Naugatuck, Connecticut. She is a 2024 graduate of Quinnipiac University in Connecticut, earning her bachelor’s degree in Journalism at age 20. At Quinnipiac, Murphy devoted herself to the college’s student-run newspaper, The Quinnipiac Chronicle. Serving as the paper’s news editor her senior year, she broke stories about everything from the college’s multimillion-dollar hedge fund accounts in the Cayman Islands to the questionable firing of the university’s head women’s lacrosse coach.
In summer 2024, Murphy interned at NBC Connecticut’s digital desk, helping to find local news stories, write breaking news briefs, publish televised news segments and curate the station’s digital content.
Murphy’s passion for journalism emerged at age 11 amid the 2016 election cycle, and she is excited to continue her journalism education in the Washington, D.C., area beginning in an election year. At the Howard Center, Murphy strives to further develop her data analysis, research and investigative capabilities. In the future, Murphy hopes to become an investigative reporter in Washington, as her ultimate goal as a journalist is to shine light on the issues public officials would rather remain in the shadows.
Outside of journalism, Murphy enjoys rifling through nonprofit tax returns, doomscrolling on X and starting but never finishing every project she thinks she’ll finally put her mind to this time.
Adriana Navarro
Adriana Navarro is a digital journalist from Charlotte, North Carolina. At the start of her career, she worked in the weather industry and reported on everything from live coverage of severe weather outbreaks to large data projects following disaster recovery efforts at AccuWeather. Some of her past articles focused on Hurricane Dorian survivors as they rebuilt from the deadly Category 5 hurricane while also dealing with the recent onset of the COVID-19 pandemic; mapping out the timeline of the forecasts for Hurricane Ian and Lee County’s late response to it; and exploring the role LGBTQ+ centers play in preparing a population for potentially life-threatening weather. In the future, she hopes to focus on investigative and data journalism to examine and publicize the inequities of disaster recovery and intersectional climate solutions.
Navarro graduated with a degree in journalism from Ohio University in 2018 with a specialization and certificate in women, gender and sexuality studies. She was a Dow Jones News Fund intern in the data track the following summer at AccuWeather, where she later joined the team as a digital journalist and helped to write the company’s inclusive style guide. In her spare time, she loves to read, embroider and convince anyone she can to add cheese to their hot chocolate.
Taylor Nichols
Taylor Nichols is a journalist from Bellingham, Washington, with a background in higher education reporting. She spent six years covering her community college and university campuses while earning her bachelor’s in Journalism at Western Washington University. She went on to work for an organization that uses data to help students make informed decisions about college. She wrote resources to help students choose where to go to college, breaking down publicly available data sets from the U.S. Department of Education to highlight colleges where students tend to have low debt and higher salaries.
Her work covering student outcomes and career pathways made her realize the powerful role data can play in journalism and the impact it can have on people’s lives. She joined the University of Maryland’s master’s program in 2023 to study data journalism.
In the first year of her graduate program, Nichols started freelancing for Street Sense, a publication covering homelessness in Washington, D.C. She won the 2024 SPJ Dateline Award for business reporting at a weekly newspaper for her coverage of a local business owner who was formerly homeless in Washington.
At the Howard Center, Nichols is excited to put her data skills into practice and learn how to use data analysis for investigative reporting. She’s particularly interested in covering housing, addiction, education and immigration, and hopes to use her reporting to expose the ways in which different communities are disproportionately impacted by these issues.
Ijeoma Opara
Ijeoma Opara is a journalist and graduate student from Nigeria. She studied at Nnamdi Azikiwe University and received a bachelor's degree in Theatre Arts in 2017.
She has worked as a journalist at the International Centre for Investigative Reporting for the past three years, and covered several beats including gender and metro. She has a keen interest in reporting issues from the human angle, amplifying voices of marginalized groups in society and recently completed a short course in Public Interest Journalism at the Radio Netherlands Training Centre.
With a background in the arts, she understands the role of storytelling in driving change. Her experience in journalism has also helped her recognize the importance of telling compelling stories using data.
As a Howard fellow, Opara looks forward to learning to gather and make sense of big data, and interpret it to readers in ways that can be quickly understood to make impact.
Haley Parsley
Haley Parsley is a graduate student from Baltimore City. Her interest in journalism stems from her childhood in Baltimore, where she was inspired by watchdog reporters’ efforts to expose government and police corruption.
Parsley’s passion for investigative research developed while working as an investigator at a fair housing law firm in Northern California. Her investigations led to the filing of CSA v. Neri, a lawsuit alleging sexual harassment of low-income mothers by a San Diego landlord. She also gathered key evidence for HRC v. K3 Holdings, which alleged national origin discrimination by a housing developer against Latino families living in Los Angeles’ Koreatown neighborhoods.
While living in Northern California, Parsley freelanced for Mission Local, a nonprofit newspaper covering the Mission neighborhood of San Francisco. Her writing focused on queer life and culture in the city.
At the Howard Center, Parsley hopes to work on stories about affordable housing and discriminatory housing policies. She is excited to write about Baltimore, her beloved hometown.
April Quevedo
April Quevedo is a graduate student and Howard fellow. She graduated with a B.A. in English from the University of Illinois Chicago. She began her career in the supply chain and transportation industry, working for one of the world’s largest third-party logistics providers, C.H. Robinson. During her time at Robinson, she learned the importance of interpreting and using data to tell a story and influence stakeholders. Over the last seven years, she has supported a handful of midsize and enterprise-level accounts, which has given her many opportunities to build consultative partnerships, analyze data and gain market share.
Quevedo hopes to use investigative journalism to hold elected officials and those in other positions of power accountable to effect change in underrepresented communities similar to the one she grew up in on the northwest side of Chicago. She looks forward to developing her reporting skills at the University of Maryland.
Tiasia Saunders
Tiasia Saunders is a recent honors graduate who was a Media, Journalism, and Film major/ English minor at Howard University. She worked for several publications such as The Hilltop student publication as a news and politics staff reporter, Truth be Told as editor-in-chief and Washington Parent as a staff intern. Her research interests include examining racial disparity through socioeconomic issues in America and its impact on minority, Black and POC communities.
Additionally, she was a member of the first cohort of Dow Jones HBCU Media Collective, a selected member of Bloomberg’s HBCU Academy of Excellence event and invited to the Investigative Reporter and Editors Conference (IRE). She is passionate about becoming a data journalist to be able to highlight racial disparity through data visualizations.
Caley Fox Shannon
Caley Fox Shannon joined the Howard Center for Investigative Journalism after nearly five years working as a documentary film producer. After obtaining her degree in French from Carleton College, she began her career in film at Breakwater Studios in Los Angeles. There, she contributed to “Almost Famous” and “Cause of Life,” two short documentary series that premiered on The New York Times Op-Docs platform. She also co-produced “A Concerto Is A Conversation,” which was nominated for Best Documentary, Short Subject at the 2021 Academy Awards.
Shannon produced her first feature documentary, "Fire Department, Inc.," which focuses on a small firefighting union’s battle against privatization on her home turf in suburban Chicago. She also co-produces "Rough Cut," a podcast about nonfiction filmmaking presented by The Video Consortium. Shannon is passionate about food security, worker’s rights and social justice. At Merrill College, she looks forward to reporting on domestic politics, economic indicators and the legal system.