Meet Our Training Community
Sunlight Research collaborates with top leaders and experts across various fields to add value and depth to our workshops. Our community-driven approach to supporting local journalists brings a diverse exchange of knowledge and perspectives.
Experts
Private investigator and fraud examiner
Lecia Kaslofsky
Lecia is a licensed private investigator and certified fraud examiner with 25 years of investigation and training experience. She specializes in teaching how to find obscure and historical facts with public records and web research. She was also the co-founder of FactBox, a fact-management tool for lawyers, and ReportWriter, a fact-management tool for investigators, before its sale in 2020. Lecia is based in San Francisco, California.
Pulitzer Prize-winning Investigative Journalist
Laurie Cohen
Laurie P. Cohen was a reporter for The Wall Street Journal from 1983 to 2008. She spent most of those years reporting on stories about law and crime. Among the events she covered were the implosion of investment bank Drexel Burnham Lambert and the arrest and conviction of its junk bond chief, Michael Milken; the arrest and conviction of Tyco Corp. CEO Dennis Kozlowski and the imprisonment of Martha Stewart. She has won multiple prizes for her reporting, including a Gerald Loeb Award and a Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting. Laurie left WSJ in 2008 and went to work for three different investment firms. At each of these, she applied journalistic skills to examine public and private companies being evaluated for investments. She now works for non-profits that advocate for undocumented workers and families in New York. Laurie graduated from the University of Michigan with a B.A. in political science and Chinese language and literature. She then got Masters Degrees from Columbia University in Political Science and Journalism.
News App Developer and lead maintainer of ProPublica's Nonprofit Explorer
Andrea Suozzo
Executive Director of Trusting News
Joy Mayer
Director of Research Data Services, Indiana University
Mikala Narlock
Data Reporter, MuckRock
Dillon Bergin
Senior Research Data Management Consultant, Duke University
Sophia Lafferty-Hess
Sophia Lafferty-Hess obtained an M.S. in Information Science and a Master of Public Administration from the University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill. Sophia has focused her career on supporting researchers as they manage and share their data with a passion for enhancing data access and reuse. Sophia currently works at Duke University Libraries as a Research Data Management Consultant where she provides consultations and instruction as well as contributes to the data curation and repository program. Sophia is actively involved in the Data Curation Network where she chairs the Education Committee as well as leads a project to develop specialized data curation trainings for unique data types.
Panelists
The Marshall Project
Daphne Duret
Daphne Duret is a staff writer for The Marshall Project. She reports on policing issues across the country. In her previous role, she worked at USA Today, where she served on the investigations team. While at the paper, she was part of the team that received the 2022 Hillman Prize for Newspaper Journalism for their work on “Behind the Blue Wall,” a series that revealed retaliation in police departments across the country against officers who made misconduct claims against their coworkers. She also covered legal issues for The Palm Beach Post and has worked at the St. Louis Post Dispatch and The Miami Herald. She is a graduate of Florida International University and a founding board member of D.I.M.E., a nonprofit organization empowering students in underserved areas. She is based in south Florida.
Austin American-Statesman
Tony Plohetski
Tony Plohetski joined the Austin American-Statesman in 2000 and is currently an investigative reporter and associate editor of investigations. Since 2013, he has worked in partnership with KVUE, Austin’s ABC affiliate, where he is the station’s senior investigative reporter. Plohetski received the Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Award last year for his work covering the Uvalde school shooting in May 2022 that killed 19 children and two teachers. He also was the Statesman’s lead reporter for its Uvalde coverage, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize Gold Medal for public service. Plohetski’s work in Uvalde made him a national authority, appearing nearly 50 times on national news networks in the first two months after the shooting, including PBS NewsHour, NPR, MSNBC, and CNN. Two years earlier, his series “Lights. Camera. Violence.” in 2020 exposed questionable police actions – seemingly for the sake of entertainment – after a reality television show partnered with an Austin-area sheriff’s office. The work prompted the cancellation of the highly rated national TV show and a new law in Texas banning law enforcement from partnering with television reality shows. It also led to the indictments of two deputies on manslaughter charges in Ambler's death — they were later acquitted — and the indictments of the then-sheriff and an assistant county attorney on evidence tampering charges related to Ambler's death. That case is ongoing. Plohetski also has served as a consultant for ABC’s “20/20.” He is routinely invited to speak to community groups and college journalism classes at the University of Texas and St. Edward’s University in Austin, where he has served as an adjunct professor. He also has been a guest lecturer at Louisiana State University’s Manship School of Mass Communication and the University of Mississippi.
The Houston Chronicle
Andrea Ball
Andrea Ball is an investigative reporter at the Houston Chronicle. Over the last three decades, she has written about local and statewide issues, including policing, foster care, social services and psychiatric hospitals. Andrea is a passionate advocate of narrative writing. She uses storytelling techniques in as many stories as possible. Before joining the Chronicle in January 2023, Andrea worked as a reporter for USA Today and the Austin American-Statesman. Her work has been recognized by National Headliners, IRE, SPJ/Sigma Delta Chi and Texas APME. She was part of the Austin American-Statesman team named a 2023 Pulitzer finalist for its work on the Uvalde school shooting.
CBS NY
Walter Smith Randolph
Walter Smith Randolph is an Emmy, Murrow, and Sigma Delta Chi award-winning journalist who is currently the Executive Producer of Investigations at CBS News New York. He also serves as Vice President-Broadcast of the National Association of Black Journalists and as an Adjunct Assistant Professor at CUNY’s Newmark Graduate School of Journalism. Before returning home to New York City, Walter spent more than a decade working as a reporter and anchor around the country at stations in Elmira, NY (WENY); Flint, MI (WEYI); Kalamazoo, MI (WWMT) and Cincinnati, OH (WKRC). Walter also launched and led The Accountability Project, an award-winning investigative unit at Connecticut Public Broadcasting which produced long-form documentaries for the station’s PBS channel and NPR station. Walter is a proud graduate of Villanova University and CUNY’s Newmark Graduate School of Journalism. He’s also a member of IRE: Investigative Reporters & Editors and Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity, Inc.
ProPublica
Dave McSwane
The Houston Chronicle
Neena Satija