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.)

Lea Thompson (vice president) just left NBC where she was Dateline's chief correspondent primarily covering consumer, health, safety and environmental issues for 15 years. She is about to tackle some freelance projects she hopes will make a difference. Thompson, who is a long-time IRE member and a frequent speaker at IRE conferences, began her career at WRC-Washington, D.C., where she was an anchor, reporter, co-head of the investigative unit, and host of the Byline: Lea Thompson show. In 1992, Thompson moved to Dateline and NBC News. Her investigative work was the driving force behind three acts of Congress and has initiated more than two dozen Congressional and governmental agency hearings, as well as prompting recalls and investigations by dozens of federal, state and local governments and brought about numerous changes by manufacturers and retailers. Her work has won every major journalism award including multiple Peabody, Polk, Murrow and national Emmy awards, the Gerald Loeb Award, and duPont Awards and 17 local Emmies. Thompson, is most proud of her multiple IRE Awards and finalist nominations. She can be reached at . (Originally elected 2007; current term expires June 2011.)

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.)

Duff Wilson (secretary) is an investigative reporter for The New York Times. He is the first two-time winner of Harvard University’s Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting. He was also honored with two Polk Awards, a Broun, Loeb and Oakes, and was a Pulitzer Prize finalist three times while with The Seattle Times. Wilson’s book, Fateful Harvest, won an IRE Award in 2001. In his spare time, he created the Reporter’s Desktop, www.reporter.org/desktop, a Web launch pad used by many journalists. Wilson can be reached by e-mail at . (Originally elected 2006; current term expires June 2010.)

Manny Garcia (executive committee member) 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 2010.)

Cheryl Phillips (chairman) is the data enterprise editor at The Seattle Times. She supervises a small team which works across departments to produce interactive stories and databases. She also oversees suburban coverage. Previously at The Times, where she has worked since 2002, she has served as deputy investigations editor and an investigative reporter. In Seattle, she has twice been a member of reporting teams that were finalists for the Pulitzer prize. Phillips reported and wrote for the "Your Courts, Their Secrets" series, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer in investigative reporting in 2007. She also was part of a team that reported on the Washington, D.C., sniper suspects in 2002. That coverage was a Pulitzer finalist in the breaking news category. She has worked as computer-assisted reporting editor for USA Today's sports section, as a CAR projects editor at The Detroit News, covered local government and the state legislature at the Great Falls Tribune in Montana and was a reporter at the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, where she covered stadium issues of the Texas Rangers baseball team and wrote about then-team owner George W. Bush. She can be reached at . (Originally elected 2001; current term expires June 2011.)

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 2010.)

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.)

Stephen C. Miller retired from The New York Times in 2008 after a 20 year career there. He worked at a reporter, covering technology. In addition to his reporting duties, he directed the training of reporters and editors in the use of emerging technologies.  Miller started his career in broadcasting, spending 12 years at CBS News in a variety of positions, including night news manager. He has trained journalists around the world for nearly 30 years. He currently works as a freelance journalist and educator. (Originally elected 1998; current term expires June 2010.) . (Originally elected 1998; current term expires June 2010.)

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.)

Mc Nelly Torres most recently was a consumer/watchdog reporter for the Sun Sentinel in South Florida where she wrote about consumer issues. Previously she was assigned to the Miami bureau where she covered Miami-Dade County and its massive $5.6 billion bureaucracy and the home of more than 2 million people. She was an education reporter for the San Antonio Express-News where she wrote about corruption in school construction. Her work contributed to the conviction of an 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 filling process. In Oklahoma, she wrote a three-part series illustrating the sheriff's inability to solve homicides while showing the similarities between them. She worked for small newspapers in Texas where she covered regional news. Mc Nelly holds a bachelor's degree in journalism from Colorado State University-Pueblo, formerly known as the University of Southern Colorado. Her current work as a consumer reporter has led to the conviction of a businessman with a history of defrauding consumers and an attorney general investigation and subsequent lawsuit of a foreclosure rescue firm. Mc Nelly was born and raised in Puerto Rico but has lived around the world while following a military husband who retired in 2005. (Originally elected 2008; current term expires June 2010.)

Lawan Williams is not the traditional journalist - graduating from journalism school and entering the business right out of college. She took a different route by serving in the U.S. military and then working for the Coca-Cola Company for almost 10 years before pursuing her dream to become a journalist. She started as a news trainee at WSB in Atlanta. It was a great opportunity that sold her on investigative reporting. Going to IRE, she discovered her corporate computer skills would come in handy in journalism - so she diligently studied CAR. She worked as a consumer investigative producer at WFTV in Orlando, Fla. From there she moved to Phoenix to join the ABC 15 investigators at KNXV, where she was able to do some extraordinary work with some extraordinary journalists. She worked as the executive producer for investigations and special projects at KSHB in Kansas City. Currently, Williams is the data projects manager at E.W. Scripps in Cincinnati.(Originally elected 2008; current term expires June 2010.)

Phil Williams 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 2010.)