Brooke Williams

Brooke Williams, affiliated faculty with the Boston University Institute for Global Sustainability (IGS), is an investigative reporter and educator who specializes in data journalism. Her work has contributed to a Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting, a George Polk Award, and a Gerald Loeb Award, among many others. Williams’ students help cover the city of Newton for the Boston Globe, and she co-runs the Justice Media Computational Journalism co-Lab, a collaboration among Spark! CDS, COM, and the Hub where computer science and journalism students and faculty produce data-driven investigations for local and national news outlets.

As a contributor to The New York Times, Williams co-authored and built the database behind a series of front-page investigations into think tanks, foreign governments, corporations and influence. As a reporter at the Center for Public Integrity, Williams was on the team that produced “Windfalls of War,” an award-winning investigation into defense contracts in Iraq and Afghanistan. She also co-authored “Harmful Error: Investigating America’s Local Prosecutors” and contributed a chapter to “The Buying of the President 2004,” a New York Times bestselling book. Early in her career, she worked as an investigative reporter at The San Diego Union-Tribune where her collaborative investigations into wildfire cleanup, city finances, and other issues had a lasting impact.

Before joining Boston University, she was a residential journalism fellow at the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University. Her internationally recognized data-driven investigations have appeared in print and online as well as on radio and TV. Williams currently is a contributor to The Intercept and working on a multi-year investigation into federal prosecutors that utilizes machine learning.