Learn about the terrific group of 14 master's students in the 2025-26 cohort of Howard Center for Investigative Journalism fellows at the University of Maryland's Philip Merrill College of Journalism.
Our returning fellows — Liam Bowman, Cat Murphy, Ijeoma Opara, Haley Parsley and Tiasia Saunders — are joined by Aline Behar Kado, Isabella González von Hauske, Bex Heimbrock, David Landerman, Sammy (Yi-Ting) Liu, Mehedi Marof, Nicole Ramos, Raphael Romero Ruiz and Jake Tiger.
Check out their bios below.
Aline Behar Kado
Aline Behar Kado is a graduate student from Mexico City, but grew up in the Washington, D.C., area.
Her passion for reporting started in high school, when she was living in Mexico, and led her to American University, where she completed her undergraduate degree in Journalism with a minor in French (and a certificate in beekeeping). She has worked as an intern for The Baltimore Banner and El Tiempo Latino, a Spanish publication in Washington, D.C. Her reporting has primarily revolved around Latino communities in the D.C. area, culminating in a capstone focused on Latino farmworkers disproportionately being affected by heatstroke in the U.S. She has previously worked as a copy editor and managing editor for The Eagle and as a data reporter for The Diamondback.
She hopes to learn more about data and investigative work with the Howard Center and grow as
a professional journalist. In her spare time, Behar Kado loves watching movies and picking up new hobbies such as the ukulele and crocheting.
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.
Isabella González von Hauske
With 10 years of experience, Isabella González von Hauske has delivered high-impact investigative reporting from Mexico’s most influential newsrooms. After starting her career at a local radio station in her hometown of Veracruz, Mexico, she moved to Reforma, one of Mexico’s most independent newspapers. As a daily reporter, González covered diverse and significant beats, including education, foreign affairs and the presidency.
She also worked at El País México, the Mexican version of the internationally renowned newspaper. For the past five years, González was a key member of the special investigations team at Latinus, a leading independent news organization in Mexico. There, she broke exclusive, critical stories on corruption within the last presidential administration. Notably, her reporting uncovered how the Mexican military awarded multimillion-dollar contracts to shell companies for major national infrastructure projects. Also, she participated on investigations that exposed corruption networks involving the former president’s sons and various Mexican institutions.
González joined the Howard Center at the University of Maryland to pursue her master’s degree and deepen her expertise in investigative journalism, benefiting from the combined support of a prestigious Fulbright scholarship, the University of Maryland and the Howard Center. She is driven by a commitment to apply this advanced knowledge back in Mexico. Her goal is to lead a team of investigative journalists, continuing to shed light on crucial public interest issues and fostering accountability.
Bex Heimbrock
Bex Heimbrock is an award-winning journalist based in Washington, D.C. As news editor for their undergraduate student paper The Wire, Heimbrock uncovered a sealed state attorney general investigation into their school for alleged Title IX and campus safety violations, uncovering a pattern of abuse by school officials, and spotlighting victims' voices in the process. For this work, they were awarded the Society of Professional Journalists' regional Mark of Excellence Award.
In 2025, Heimbrock graduated cum laude from Whitman College with honors in Religion and Indigeneity, Race and Ethnicity Studies. During their time at Whitman, as a three-time Louis B. Perry Research Award recipient, Heimbrock worked closely with Zahi Zalloua, the Cushing Eells Professor of Philosophy and Literature, on urgent questions of reason, ressentiment and justice. Heimbrock's work appears in two of Zalloua's recent books, "The Politics of the Wretched" and "Fanon, Žižek, and the Violence of Resistance."
From 2024-25, Heimbrock spent six months conducting participatory research on the Walla Walla Valley Cowboy Church, culminating in an Honors thesis exploring the intersections of race, gender and power in this growing religious movement. Heimbrock's work at the intersections of race, gender and power has appeared in Teen Vogue and the online Feminist Theory Journal. At the Howard Center, Heimbrock looks forward to continuing critical engagement with structures of power.
David Landerman
David Landerman is a critical thinker with a friendly nature and an odd sense of humor. He is a second-career journalism student with a degree in Mechanical Engineering from Northeastern University.
Born and raised in Washington, D.C., Landerman is pivoting to investigative journalism for the same reason he became an engineer — to make a positive impact. He is committed to using his empathetic nature, ADHD superpowers and inability to let important things go to spotlight legitimized exploitation.
Landerman is a generalist with diverse working experience in renewable energy, medical devices and semiconductor equipment. He also has had more public-facing jobs in restaurants, schools and even drove a pedicab for a while. While working as a test engineer, he realized his passion gravitated not toward science and technology but toward investigation and advocacy on behalf of his fellow employees. His most inspired projects were all self-initiated research into benefits issues, retirement plan transparency and other employee-led initiatives. After this, he noticed a pattern: the ease of interactions with strangers on his pedicab, the satisfaction from probing conversations with that random party guest, the urge for extensive research that certain articles would inspire. It all pointed to a much happier life in journalism.
His goal is to become an investigative reporter focusing on health care, financial policy, labor disputes, regulatory process, corporate malfeasance, you name it. If it’s important, boring and purposefully opaque, Landerman wants to find a way to make it engaging for the public. He’s eager to learn from his professors as well as his peers, and work hard for the people whose stories he hopes to tell.
Sammy (Yi-Ting) Liu
Sammy (Yi-Ting) Liu is a data journalist from Taiwan. With a bachelor’s degree in Economics from National Taiwan University and a passion for design, she uncovers hidden stories through data analysis and visualization for Taiwan’s Business Weekly and Public Television Service.
In the past two years, she has covered diverse topics in economics and politics, including pollution within the high-tech supply chain and the political landscape of Taiwan’s elections.
As a Howard fellow and Fulbright scholar, Liu is excited to sharpen her computational investigative skills, shedding light on neglected harms and address underlying societal issues by crunching data in innovative and humane ways. She is particularly passionate about examining how power is exercised through political systems and technology, and its impact on people and democracy.
Mehedi Marof
Mehedi Marof is a Bangladeshi journalist pursuing a master’s in journalism at the Philip Merrill College of Journalism.
He graduated summa cum laude in journalism from the University of Liberal Arts Bangladesh, where he received both the Vice Chancellor’s Award and the Dean’s Award.
Marof began his journalism career at The Business Standard newspaper in Dhaka, Bangladesh, and later joined Netra News, an independent investigative outlet known for its award-winning reporting. While based in Dhaka, he also worked as a freelance journalist and his bylines have appeared in major international publications, including Al Jazeera, NBC News, Dialogue Earth, Eco-Business, The Wire, Scroll and The Diplomat.
His on-the-ground coverage for multiple international media outlets during the student-led uprising that led to the ouster of Bangladesh’s longest-serving prime minister received acclaim from academics, journalists and the general public. One of his reports for Al Jazeera — examining the corrosive consequences of party-backed and violent student politics — was carried and republished by at least 50 South Asian outlets, including Bangladesh’s leading daily, Prothom Alo, and India’s Times of India. The story helped shape national discourse and contributed to tangible policy changes. Marof is also a 2024 Bangladesh Tech Policy Fellow.
Drawn by a passion for fair, truthful public interest journalism and holding power to account, he seeks to sharpen his data, investigative and storytelling skills at Merrill College to tell stories that truly matter and change lives.
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.
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.
Nicole Ramos
Nicole Ramos is joining the Howard Center for Investigative Journalism as a fellow with a global career spanning from farms in the Philippines to prisons across Texas. As someone who once envisioned life as a missionary, Ramos’ time at Abilene Christian University changed everything she understood about human rights, equity and justice.
She piloted the university’s Justice and Urban Studies program, implementing a design-learning curriculum in Dallas, Texas, schools. This culminated in accompanying a group of students to the global Change Conference in India to present their design-learning project. During her undergraduate experience, Ramos also worked on a goat farm in the Philippines and studied in Europe and Africa.
After graduating from ACU, Ramos joined the Peace Corps and lived in a village alongside indigenous subsistence farmers in Panama for two years. She organized community development projects, ranging from sexual health education for underrepresented groups to obtaining a grant to improve her community’s water systems.
Ramos earned a master’s degree in international relations from Northeastern University. In her most recent position as a mitigation specialist with Texas Defender Service, she conducted exhaustive investigations for capital and noncapital legal defense teams, strategically collaborating with them on representation. Over the course of her time at TDS, she fostered intentional relationships with clients on death row, advocating for their stories to be heard.
As a Howard fellow, Ramos is ecstatic about chasing her childhood dream of becoming a journalist. She hopes to incorporate her diverse background into a career investigating national and international human rights issues such as mass incarceration, extreme sentencing, social and environmental justice, and holding systems of power accountable.
Raphael Romero Ruiz
Raphael Romero Ruiz is a graduate student and journalist from Tucson, Arizona. He recently covered the border beat for The Arizona Republic, reporting on the 2024 presidential election, the first 100 days and beyond of President Donald Trump’s second administration, and how U.S.-Mexico border communities have been impacted by American immigration policy.
Prior to that, Ruiz began his journalism career shortly before graduating from Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication, earning a B.A. in Journalism with minors in Transborder Chicana/o and Latina/o Studies and Digital Audiences.
For nearly five years, he focused his reporting on working-class Latine communities in metro Phoenix, spotlighting community activists, artists and everyday people shaping local culture. His journalism emphasizes the power of storytelling to uplift underrepresented communities like his own — the Rose neighborhood on Tucson’s southside.
He is excited to study data journalism to strengthen his reporting on immigration at a time when harmful narratives and disinformation heavily influence federal immigration policies. He aims to make complex and obscure data accessible to communities like his own, especially people like his parents — proud Mexican immigrants.
Tiasia Saunders
Tiasia Saunders is an 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.
Jake Tiger
Jake Tiger is a graduate student from Hamilton, New Jersey. In 2025, he graduated from Rider University with a B.A. in Journalism, and was a four-year member of the institution’s award-winning student newspaper, The Rider News. He served as sportswriter, sports editor, managing editor and executive editor at The Rider News, winning a total of seven individual awards at the state and regional levels.
As executive editor in his senior year, The Rider News was named best student newspaper in the state by the New Jersey Press Foundation. He earned first place for news writing from the New Jersey Press Foundation in 2024 and 2025.
While at Rider, Tiger interned at The SandPaper in Surf City, New Jersey, and worked as a freelance sports reporter for NJ.com. He was also a writing tutor at the university’s Academic Success Center.
At the Howard Center, Tiger is excited to blend hard-hitting data with well-sourced storytelling to create stories with real meaning and impact.