New America and Work Shift Announce Future of Work Reporting Fellows Cohort

Miranda Dunlap is a reporter covering “pathways to success” at Wisconsin Watch & Open Campus Media. She writes about education, employment and what stands between people and sustainable jobs.

She previously worked at Houston Landing, Automotive News and The State News. Her work has been recognized by Texas Managing Editors, the Michigan Press Association, the National Association of LGBTQ+ Journalists, the Milwaukee Press Club and Scripps Howard Awards.

A native Michigander, Miranda studied political science pre-law and journalism at Michigan State University.

Project (in partnership with Natalie Yahr): What jobs will Wisconsin’s new $80 million biohealth tech hub bring, and how can Wisconsinites prepare for them?

Examining the workforce effects of a massive public and private investment in Wisconsin’s biohealth industry and what job seekers need to know to benefit.

Alex English is a Tampa-based journalist, editor, and communications strategist whose work focuses on civic life, economic development, infrastructure, and the forces reshaping communities. He is interim managing editor of 83 Degrees Media, where he also reports on public institutions, regional development, nonprofits, mobility, and economic opportunity. His work has also appeared in Creative Loafing Tampa Bay, and he publishes econami, an independent Substack newsletter exploring economics, culture, consumption, status, and meaning.

Before journalism became a larger part of his work, English led communications, marketing, and public-engagement efforts across government, engineering, technology, and consumer sectors. That experience informs his interest in how institutions describe growth and opportunity—and how those narratives compare with people’s lived experiences. He holds a BA in economics from New College of Florida and an MBA from SDA Bocconi in Milan.

As a Future of Work Reporting Fellow, English will report The Missing First Rung, a three-part project examining whether Tampa Bay’s cybersecurity education and workforce programs are creating real pathways into well-paying jobs for students and career changers.

Project: The Missing First Rung: Tampa Bay’s Cybersecurity Workforce Pipeline

Examining whether Tampa Bay’s cybersecurity training pipeline is creating real pathways into well-paying work for local students and career changers.

Tasmiha Khan is a journalist in the Chicago area who reports on health equity, immigration, and caregiving. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, TIME, National Geographic, The Washington Post, The 19th, and Prism Reports, and she was recently quoted in Fast Company. Her Prism Reports investigation into refugee and immigrant mothers in U.S. higher education won a 2025 Peter Lisagor Award and was adopted into Harvard Kennedy School’s curriculum.

She is a 2026 Medill Data-Driven Reporting Project grantee, a Nova Institute Media Fellow, and a former Knight Science Journalism Fellow at MIT, with additional fellowships from the Pulitzer Center and the USC Annenberg Center for Health Journalism. Trained in neuroscience and a former campaign director focused on maternal justice, she reports on how caregiving, immigration status, and economic systems shape families’ access to opportunity. As a Future of Work Reporting Fellow, she will examine whether immigrant mothers can reach Illinois’ federally funded semiconductor training pipeline. She is a mother of three.

Project: Training Seats, Closed Doors? Fear, Childcare, and Immigrant Mothers in Illinois’ Semiconductor Push

Examining how immigration fear and childcare costs shape who benefits from Illinois’ semiconductor workforce push.

P.R. Lockhart covers the relationships between local economic policy, industry, and equitable community development. She currently works as the economic development reporter for the Connecticut Mirror, a nonprofit newsroom covering the links between policy, community and accountability in the Nutmeg State.

While she reports on economic policy broadly, her recent work focuses on Connecticut’s growing ambitions in applied artificial intelligence, advanced manufacturing, and quantum computing, highlighting the effects emerging technologies have on the economic well-being of local communities. She is particularly interested in how publicly financed tech-based economic development projects could impact historically marginalized and vulnerable populations.

Her fellowship project will examine who ultimately benefits from Connecticut’s efforts to develop a new economic sector focused on quantum computing, an effort that could receive up to $160 million in financial support from the National Science Foundation.

P.R. previously worked as an economic development reporter in West Virginia for Mountain State Spotlight, where she covered inequality, workforce development, and state legislative policy. Her career began in Washington D.C. with fellowship and staff writer roles with Mother Jones and Vox. Her work has also been published by The American Prospect, NBC News and The Guardian US.

She has received several training and fellowship opportunities, including a 2025 Xana Fellowship from the Society for Advancing Business Editing and Writing. In 2024, she was selected as a participant in the International Women’s Media Foundation’s Gwen Ifill Mentorship Program.

P.R. graduated with a degree in psychology and a certificate in policy journalism and media studies from Duke University.

Project: Starting an Engine

Following Connecticut’s aspirations to build out a quantum computing sector and if the state-supported initiative will ultimately strengthen employment and lift up communities.

Sophia Luna is a policy analyst at EdNC, a nonprofit media outlet that covers North Carolina education news and policy. There, she writes about the state’s community college system, workforce development efforts, and young people’s well-being.

Born and raised in North Carolina’s Blue Ridge Mountains, Sophia now calls the state’s capital city, Raleigh, home. She is committed to sharing the stories of people who make her home state a better place to live, learn, and work.

Prior to joining EdNC, Sophia earned a master’s degree in public policy from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where she also holds majors in Hispanic literature and policy analysis.

Project: A federal investment in the textile industry and its effort to reweave, revitalize, and reskill the economic fabric of one rural city.

Residents of a community along North Carolina’s Appalachian mountain corridor aim to transform their legacy industry into a new source of economic opportunity.

Rebecca Egan McCarthy is a freelance writer based in Philadelphia. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New Republic, The New York Review of Books, The Baffler, and many other outlets. She’s a 2026-2027 fellow with the Law and Justice Journalism Project and a 2026 Climate Economics Journalism Fellow with NYU Stern. She was previously the 2025-2026 Climate News Reporting Fellow at Grist.

Project: The Shipbuilding Revival

A deep dive into efforts to revitalize the nation’s shipbuilding industry.

Katie Myers reports on climate change in Appalachia through a partnership between Grist and Blue Ridge Public Radio in western North Carolina. She previously served as a climate solutions fellow at Grist, and as an economic transition reporter in eastern Kentucky with the Ohio Valley ReSource and WMMT 88.7 FM. Her freelance work has appeared in the BBC, NPR, Belt Magazine, and the New Republic, among others, and has been supported by the USC-Annenberg Center for Health Journalism, the Society for Environmental Journalists, the Heinrich Boell Foundation, America Amplified, and the Solutions Journalism Network. She contributed to breaking news reporting during Hurricane Helene that won Blue Ridge Public Radio multiple awards, including a national Edward Murrow award and the Online News Association Breaking News Award. She was named one of three 2026 Emerging Journalists of the Year by Covering Climate Now.

Project: A just transition to what?

Locating the past, present, and future of the long-promised Appalachian just transition.

Jeremy Ney is a leading voice on inequality and opportunity in America. He is the author of The Opportunity Map: How to Close the Divide Between Inequality and Prosperity, which proposes a new approach to problem solving in America, grounded in local success. A former economic policymaker at the Federal Reserve, he writes the best-selling Substack, American Inequality, and teaches at Columbia Business School. His work has appeared in The New York Times, NPR, BBC, The Washington Post, Financial Times, and Bloomberg CityLab.

Jeremy focuses on place-based opportunity and why some parts of the country fall into poverty while others rise up towards prosperity. His research on affordability covers the interconnected nature of housing, healthcare, education, employment, and incomes. Jeremy’s reporting style combines data science, data visualization, on-the-ground-stories, and economic policy. He holds degrees from MIT, Harvard, and the University of Pennsylvania.

Project: How Opportunity Industries can Collapse Inequality and Promote Prosperity

How comparable counties reveal a playbook for moving California farmworkers in the Imperial Valley out of cycles of unemployment and up the economic ladder

Michael Sainato is a labor reporter at The Guardian. His writing has also appeared in The New York Times, HuffPost, Gizmodo, Vice News, The Nation and several other publications. 

He has appeared on numerous television and radio shows to discuss his work, including CBS News, BBC News, and WNYC.

In 2022, he received the Labor and Employment Relations Association Kenneth May Media Award and the February 2025 Sidney Award from Sidney Hillman Foundation. He previously served as a Gerontological Society of America Journalists in Aging Fellow in 2021, and CUNY John Jay-University of Pennsylvania Quattrone Center Criminal Justice Reporting Fellow and CUNY John Jay Cash Justice Reporting Fellow in 2019.

He was born and raised in Albany, New York, where he currently resides. He graduated from Binghamton University, served in the US Navy, ran a 4:23 mile in high school, and is also a citizen of Italy.

Project: The growth of AI, the countering efforts to regulate the industry, and the impact on workers in New York.

Investigating the impacts and regulatory efforts made during New York’s one-year data center moratorium enacted on July 14, 2026 through the Future Works Commission, labor unions, and ongoing data center fights.

Andrea Steffes-Tuttle is an independent journalist based in Boulder, Colorado, covering business, labor, and the economy across the Front Range. Her reporting focuses on the workers, families, and communities often missing from mainstream coverage, and she specializes in making complex business topics and emerging technologies relatable to a general audience.

Her work appears primarily in The Colorado Sun and The Denver Post, where she has covered subjects ranging from commercial vacancies to childcare infrastructure and the care economy. Drawing on extensive labor reporting, she examines how economic forces shape daily life and financial stability for working families in Colorado and beyond.

Her coverage was recognized in both the 2025 and 2026 Top of the Rockies Excellence in Journalism contest, sponsored by the Colorado Professional Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists.

Project: Who Builds the Quantum Economy? Jobs, Public Incentives and Colorado’s Big Bet

Investigating what public investment in the quantum industry means for the workers, taxpayers and economy of Colorado’s Front Range.

Natalie Yahr is a reporter for Wisconsin Watch and Open Campus, where she reports on how Wisconsinites are finding good, safe, family-sustaining jobs — and what’s getting in their way. Her stories have explained why foreign-trained doctors often struggle to restart their careers in Wisconsin, what’s keeping Wisconsin high schools from offering more college classes and what Wisconsinites need to know about the latest changes to financial aid and student loans.

Previously, she covered the Madison-area economy for the Cap Times, where she tracked local union drives, explored why home care workers in Wisconsin make so little and investigated a moving company whose surprise bills sometimes topped $30,000. She has also written for the Center for Journalism Ethics, Columbia Journalism Review and the New York Times. “Why Should I Tell You?,” her 2019 guide to less- extractive reporting, has been read by journalists and added to journalism school curricula across the country. She’s received awards from the Milwaukee Press Club, the Society for Professional Journalists and the Wisconsin Newspaper Association. Before becoming a full-time journalist, Natalie lived in New Orleans, where she trained as a Spanish-English interpreter and coached adult students working to earn their high school equivalency diplomas.

Project (in partnership with Miranda Dunlap): What jobs will Wisconsin’s new $80 million biohealth tech hub bring, and how can Wisconsinites prepare for them?

Examining the workforce effects of a massive public and private investment in Wisconsin’s biohealth industry and what job seekers need to know to benefit.