Board of Directors

The IRE Board of Directors serves as the governing body of IRE. As a nonprofit organization dedicated to assisting journalists in completing investigative stories of high quality, the IRE board believes in disclosure, and so, makes these records open.

Alison Young (president) does watchdog and enterprise reporting on health issues for USA Today. She previously wrote a weekly watchdog column called Spotlight for the Sunday Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Prior to the column’s debut in October 2008, she covered the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for the AJC. Young was a member of Knight Ridder’s Washington-based investigative team from 2003-2006. Before that, she spent 10 years at the Detroit Free Press, where she was a reporter, enterprise editor and the deputy metro editor. She also has reported for The Arizona Republic and the Dallas Times Herald. Her reporting has won many awards, including two Scripps Howard awards, two Gerald Loeb Awards, two National Headliners and honors from Sigma Delta Chi, the Heywood Broun Awards and the National Press Club. She can be reached at . (Originally elected 2007; current term expires June 2011.)

Manny Garcia (vice president) is the executive editor of El Nuevo Herald. He is a former metro editor, special projects editor, courts and cops editor and member of The Miami Herald's I-team. Garcia was a key reporter and writer in The Herald's 1999 and 2002 Pulitzer Prize-winning investigations. He and Jason Grotto shared a 2004 IRE Award for their project "Justice Withheld." Garcia has done numerous seminars about journalism.(Originally elected 2006; current term expires June 2012.)

David Cay Johnston (treasurer), an IRE Medal winner and Pulitzer Prize recipient, retired from The New York Times in 2008. He is now a columnist for Tax Notes, teaches the law of the ancient world at Syracuse University’s law and management schools, writes for magazines, does commentaries for NPR, Lou Dobbs and Rachel Maddow and lectures around the world on journalism, tax and economic issues. Since 1967, when Johnston was 18, his investigations have exposed LAPD abuses, corrupt news organizations, cost a worldwide CEO his job, sent at least eight people to prison, won freedom for an innocent man after he hunted down a killer the police failed to catch, revealed corrupt charities and that Donald Trump had a negative net worth. His work exposing how the super-rich rigged the economy was recognized with an IRE Medal for my book "Perfectly Legal" and a Pulitzer for articles in The New York Times. Over two decades, Johnston is endowing IRE scholarships for young women investigative reporters of modest means. (Originally elected 2009; current term expires June 2011.)

Phil Williams (secretary) is the chief investigative reporter for WTVF-TV in Nashville, Tennessee, where his reporting has focused primarily on government waste and corruption. Phil says he cannot remember a time as a child when he did not want to be an investigative reporter. Over the years, his investigations have led to criminal charges against friends of a former Tennessee governor, several lawmakers and other political figures. His work has been honored with two George Foster Peabody Awards, a duPont-Columbia Award, a George Polk Award, two Sigma Delta Chi Awards, a national Edward R. Murrow Award, a national Emmy Award and multiple regional Emmys. Most importantly to him, Phil has received three IRE Awards - including the IRE Medal - as well as being a finalist numerous other times. He was also a finalist for Harvard University's Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting. Prior to his broadcasting days, Phil was a reporter for The Tennessean in Nashville, where he was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for public service. (Originally elected 2008; current term expires June 2012.)

Lea Thompson (executive member) was a Chief Correspondent at Dateline, NBC for 16 years and headed the investigative unit and anchored at WRC-TV, Washington, for 15. She’s now doing documentaries and teaching investigative reporting. Thompson’s work was behind three acts of Congress and has brought about dozens of laws, recalls, and policy changes as well as TV movies and three books. She has won every major broadcast journalism award – including multiple IRE, Peabody, Polk, Murrow and National Emmy awards, the Loeb, duPont and 19 Regional Emmies. She can be reached at . (Originally elected 2007; current term expires June 2011.)

Cheryl Phillips (chairman) is the data enterprise editor at the Seattle Times, where she has worked since 2002. She supervises a small team which produces stories as well as interactive data. She was one of the editors involved in breaking news coverage last year of the shooting of four police officers, which received a Pulitzer Prize. Phillips has also twice been a member of reporting teams that were finalists for a Pulitzer. She is chairman of the IRE board of directors. She can be reached at . (Originally elected 2001; current term expires June 2011.)

Sarah Cohen is the Knight professor at Duke University. She worked as a database editor at the Washington Post for more than 10 years, where she shared in the Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting, the Goldsmith award and the IRE medal. She also has worked as a reporter in Florida and as IRE’s training director. (Originally elected 2010; current term expires June 2012.)

Robert Cribb is an investigative reporter at the Toronto Star, past president of the Canadian Association of Journalists, current president of the Canadian Association of Journalists Educational Foundation, a lecturer at Toronto's Ryerson University School of Journalism and co-author of "Digging Deeper: A Canadian Reporter's Research Guide" (Oxford University Press). He has worked closely with IRE on projects including the Global Investigative Journalism Conference in Toronto and regional conferences co-hosted by the Canadian Association of Journalists and the IRE in Vancouver and Windsor, Ontario. His own news investigations over the past decade include series on serious food safety problems, exploitation of foreign workers, illegal slaughterhouses, fraudulent telemarketing boiler rooms, dangerous doctors, slum landlords, airline safety and government corruption.(Originally elected 2009; current term expires June 2012.)

Andrew Donohue is the editor of voiceofsandiego.org, the pioneering nonprofit news organization that focuses on in-depth and investigative reporting on San Diego's quality-of-life issues. He has fostered VOSD's growth from a small ragtag group of reporters in a cramped, dark and dirty office to an established and expanding news outlet that's being replicated across the country. He can be reached at . (Originally elected 2010; current term expires June 2012.)

Leonard Downie Jr. is vice president at large of The Washington Post, where he was executive editor from 1991 to 2008. During his 44 years in the Post newsroom, he also was an investigative reporter, editor on the local and national news staffs, London correspondent, and, from 1984 to 1991, managing editor under then executive editor Ben Bradlee. As deputy Metro editor from 1972 to 1974, Downie helped supervise the newspaper’s Watergate coverage. Beginning in August 2009, Downie will be Weil Family Professor of Journalism at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University. He is currently working on a report on the future of American news reporting for the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. He is the author of five books, including "The New Muckrakers" (about investigative reporters), "The News About the News: American Journalism in Peril" (with Robert G. Kaiser), and a novel, "The Rules of the Game," about an investigative reporter in Washington. (Originally elected 2009; current term expires June 2011.)

Lise Olsen is a special projects reporter at the Houston Chronicle and has served IRE as a member, staff member and committed volunteer during her 20 years as a journalist in Nebraska, Virginia, Mexico, Washington and Texas. As a computer-assisted reporting specialist, she was among the first graduates of NICAR’s first advanced boot camp in North Carolina. From 1996-98, she served as founding director of the two-year project IRE-Mexico, which later became an independent non-profit. That group helped inspire other non-profits with similar goals in Colombia, Costa Rica, Mexico, Argentina and Brazil. (Originally elected 2007; current term expires June 2011.)

Aron Pilhofer is editor of Interactive News at The New York Times, overseeing a news-focused team of journalist/developers who build dynamic, data-driven applications to enhance The Times' reporting online. He is also co-founder of DocumentCloud, a project designed to improve journalism by making source documents easier find, search, analyze and share online. DocumentCloud was awarded a $719,000 grant by the Knight Foundation in 2009.

Aron joined The Times in 2005 as a projects editor on the paper's newly expanded computer-assisted reporting team, where he specialized in stories related to money, politics and influence. Prior to joining The Times, Pilhofer was database editor at the Center for Public Integrity in Washington, where he began an ongoing project in 2002 to track a new form of political non-profit organization, so-called 527 groups. The Center's reporting was among the first to highlight the gaping hole in federal campaign finance regulations, which allows these groups to pump hundreds of millions of dollars into elections nationwide.

Before working at the Center, Pilhofer was on the national training staff of Investigative Reporters and Editors and worked for a number of years as a statehouse and projects reporter for Gannett newspapers in New Jersey and Delaware. (Originally elected 2010; current term expires June 2012.)

Mc Nelly Torres is the associate director and reporter for Florida Center for Investigative Reporting, the first bilingual investigative startup focusing on state government issues. Most recently Torres was the stimulus team leader for EdMoney.org. Torres covered education at the San Antonio Express-News in Texas where her work contributed to the conviction of a school building architect. At the Morning News in South Carolina, she garnered local and state awards for her investigative work on the state's hog farm permit filing process. Her consumer watchdog stories at the Sun-Sentinel have won state, regional and national awards. Torres is a board member for the Investigative Reporters and Editors organization. (Originally elected 2008; current term expires June 2012.)