Visualizing the uneven burden of toxic pollution in East Harris County

The state of Texas refused to release census-tract level data from its newest cancer study in East Harris County, a community overburdened by toxic pollution. To help readers understand the implications of this decision, I created a scrollytelling story that visualized how grouping data over a large geographic area can mask trends. At the request of the reporter, David Leffler, I also created a map to show how sources of toxic pollution are concentrated in the southern part of the study area near Channelview and Highlands.

Public Health Watch partnered with Univision 45 in Houston to tell this story and co-published with Inside Climate News and Texas Public Radio.

Trump Pollution Exemptions Would Shield Lawbreakers, Endanger Millions

In March of 2025, the Trump Administration's EPA announced it would reconsider rules regulating hazardous air pollutants, including the HON Rule which aimed to significantly reduce cancer risk from air toxics for millions of Americans. For Public Health Watch, I reported this data-driven investigation into the chemical manufacturers that would benefit from these changes and the potential public health impact for communities like Deer Park, Texas.

This story was co-published with Inside Climate News and edited by Savanna Strott and Jim Morris. Photography by Mark Felix.

Trump Exempts Biggest Emitters of Two Carcinogens from Pollution Rule

I reported this quick-turn follow-up story for Public Health Watch when the White House issued HON Rule exemptions to dozens of the largest chemical plants in the US. Edited by Jim Morris, photography by Mark Felix.

Michigan Air Violations Tracker

I pitched, designed and developed an interactive platform for local environmental newsroom Planet Detroit that allows readers to explore the violation history of air polluters in Michigan. It updates every day with the newest violation notices issued by EGLE.

I made the dashboard using javascript—a first for me—and created a program that looks for new violation notices every day, parses them with pdfplumber, and adds them to the data.

It's regularly utilized by environmental lawyers, college educators and citizens. In its first week, the site helped us report on a chronic violator in Southwest Detroit. Deep gratitude to Planet Detroit for making this open data accessibility project possible.

"Compost or Combust": A food waste deep dive

I contributed research, data reporting and visualization to Planet Detroit's five-part reporting project about the climate issue of Michigan food waste and potential solutions.

I analyzed data from the EPA's Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program and Landfill Methane Outreach Program, filed public records requests, compiled a dataset of state compost utilization, and created a series of charts and maps to accompany the reporting.

"Compost or Combust": Household food waste game

For Planet Detroit's deep dive into food waste, "Compost or Combust," the editor wanted to find a way to help readers understand the impact of their food waste choices.

To achieve this, I designed and wrote a narrative game using Inky. I consulted with ReFED and repurposed their Impact Calculator to walk users through the climate-warming implications of a few food waste scenarios.

Southwest Detroit steel slag processor receives 12th air quality permit violation for fallout since 2018

Using the Michigan Air Violations Tracker I developed, I reported on a chronic violator in an area of Detroit and Dearborn that is overburdened by industry and air pollution.

Quantifying mental health care accessibility for children in NYC

For a master's project, I surveyed 172 (roughly 80%) of the child and adolescent community mental health clinics in NYC and collected wait times for a new child appointment. I visualized the results alongside spatial analysis to show the distribution of clinic wait times compared to the pediatric Medicaid population. I spoke with a dozen experts about what led us to this point.

Experts often said that the insurance reimbursment rates for mental health were way too low. To try to quantify the non-insurance market rate, I scraped and and analyzed thousands of NYC-area Psychology Today provider profiles to figure out what people were charging and visualize the pay gap.

Mapping metro Detroit air permit violation disparities

I analyzed air quality permit violation data for DETROITography and visualized the disproportionate number of major and mega sources of air pollution in Wayne County.

The article includes a couple of maps of these sources and their violations compared to poverty data and the state's environmental justice scores.

Creating a living dataset of Michigan air pollution records

I scraped 19,000+ pdfs from the Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes and Energy to create a searchable dataset of air pollution records by type of document (i.e. violation notice, compliance evaluation, stack test report), date, company, county, zip code and address.

🔍 My auto-scraper searches the Michigan database daily for new documents and adds them to existing datasets.

Michigan journalists have used this dataset to keep tabs on local sources of air pollution and hold the state accountable for enforcement of its air regulations.

Visualizing the child psychologist shortage

There are nearly 1.3 million children who rely on Medicaid for health coverage in New York City. I wanted to know, how many psychologists specializing in children and adolescents are accessible to them?

I created a scraper to cross reference Medicaid provider codes with the their CMS profiles to figure out who specialized in treating children. Then I visualized the ratio of child psychologists to kids on Medicaid using hand-drawn illustrations, ai2html and scrollama.

Analyzing changes in Great Lakes water consumption

I created this quick-turn data story for Columbia's Data Studio course. I concatted nine years' worth of Great Lakes water usage data to analyze changes over time. My analysis found that water consumption increased significantly since 2019 due to a change in power generation methods.

Visualizing Denver's increasing park traffic

For Columbia's Data Studio seminar, I analyzed Google's COVID-19 Mobility data and its search trends data to illustrate how Denver residents were searching out and utilizing local parks more than in 2020.

Colorado drought and fire risk map

For Columbia's cartography course "Points Unknown", I created an interactive map visualizing current drought levels and predicted average wildfire flame intensity per county using USDA Fire Service data.

Quantifying the New York Medicaid pay gap for mental health care

Mental health professionals and advocates say Medicaid reimbursement rates are abysmal and that this plays a role in whether a provider choses to work with insurance. In an attempt to quantify this claim, I scraped thousands of NYC-area provider profiles on PsychologyToday.com to see what folks were charging on average for a session.

Community reporting: "In New York’s East Village, Young Ukrainians Hold Onto Their Culture"

I spent eight weeks in the fall of 2021 reporting on New York's Ukrainian community. This story, about a decades-long effort to pass the country's language and cultural heritage on to the next generation, was published in the Columbia News Service in December 2021.

Media analysis: Investigating the origin of the national critical race theory debate

As part of a group reporting project, my team analyzed two years' worth of Fox News broadcasts to track its coverage of critical race theory over time. Together we created a comprehensive timeline of recent events including major TV network and online coverage, protests and legislative actions.

Graphic design archive

Over the past 10+ years, I have worked with a variety of clients to create custom custom websites, graphics, logos and print media. Take a look at some of my older projects with clients like Data Driven Detroit, Detroit Public Radio + Power Company Kids Club.

Quick-turn data story: Illegal dumping in NYC

After my initial lead fell through, I had to turn the analysis, interviews and writing around for this story in two days to meet my deadline. As a mom balancing parenthood and four other graduate courses, I was pretty proud of this.

Unstructured data: Scraping GoFundMe to quantify the cost of COVID

As part of Columbia's Data Studio course, I scraped 5,000+ GoFundMe campaigns and conducted text analyses to try to capture the cost of a severe COVID diganosis.

For this story, I created a custom responsive chart using plotnine (ggplot), Adobe llustrator and ai2html.

Making a dataset: How much do states value therapy?

I wanted to know how much each state was paying providers for therapy, so I compiled a dataset of Medicaid reimbursement rates by combing through each state's provider fee schedule. I mapped the results and then compared each state's rate to its cost of living score to find disparities.