Lila Thulin
Lila Thulin covers how a major public university teaches, supports its students and turns research into public impact, with a consistent focus on history, race and ethnicity, gender, disability, housing policy and journalism. She works as a writer and media relations staffer at Berkeley News, where she develops stories that translate rankings, grants and academic work into clear, accessible narratives for wider audiences. Across her pieces, she threads institutional news through human voices and expert explanation, treating campus developments as ways to understand larger social questions.
UC Berkeley rankings, research hubs and faculty honors
Thulin regularly handles stories that place the university in national and global rankings, breaking down the numbers into what they signal about research strength and reputation. In her coverage of a recent “Best Global Universities” list, she notes that the ranking evaluates thousands of institutions worldwide and highlights how research performance and international standing contribute to the campus’s position as the top public university in the United States and among the top ten worldwide. When she reports on major grants, such as a National Science Foundation–funded “innovation hub” to turn basic research into new businesses, she explains both the scientific ambition and the practical aim of moving discoveries into real-world use.
Her faculty coverage often centers on how individual scholars embody broader shifts in their fields. In a piece on two professors receiving prestigious Guggenheim fellowships, she not only names the honor but also outlines the kinds of projects the fellowships will support, tying the awards to ongoing research themes in chemistry and related disciplines. The result is institutional reporting that balances prestige with substance: milestones are always linked to what work will actually be done, not just to headlines about status.
New classes and the student experience
Teaching and curriculum are a recurring focus in Thulin’s work, especially where new courses reflect emerging ideas or technologies. In an article surveying ten new and redesigned classes, she moves from topics like artificial intelligence to polar microbiology, using short, vivid descriptions to show how each course gives students tools to understand the contemporary world. She emphasizes the range of disciplines involved and the way faculty rethink syllabi to address current scientific, social and cultural issues.
Her reporting on student support programs looks closely at equity for those who have faced structural barriers. In a University of California feature on a long-running program for students who have been in foster care, she traces the initiative’s two-decade history and pairs it with the story of a former participant who returns as an academic counselor, illustrating how institutional support can change individual trajectories. She also writes about the Centers for Educational Equity and Excellence, highlighting how these units knit together services for students from underrepresented and nontraditional backgrounds. Across these pieces, she treats education as lived experience rather than only policy, grounding descriptions of programs in scenes of students in classrooms, advising offices and community spaces.
Race, gender and the histories behind social issues
Thulin’s beat includes history, race and ethnicity, gender and disability, and she often uses faculty experts to unpack how present-day debates rest on long, contested histories. In a feature on a historian explaining the “thorny history of love, sex and marriage,” she follows the professor from the first day of class through key themes, showing how ideas about intimacy and family have shifted across time and legal regimes. The story connects classroom discussion to contemporary arguments over relationships and rights, giving readers a framework for understanding why these issues feel so charged today.
She applies a similar lens to culture and sport. In a piece exploring how baseball has and has not changed over two centuries, built around a historian’s new book, she walks through shifts such as designated hitters and experiments with robot umpires while emphasizing what remains constant in the game’s appeal. The article uses baseball to talk about continuity, tradition and innovation, linking rule changes to longer arcs in American life. In both kinds of stories, Thulin uses accessible examples to show how race, gender and cultural norms are embedded in everyday institutions, from marriage to sports.
Service journalism on media literacy and politics
Before her current higher education focus, Thulin built experience in service journalism and political media coverage that continues to inform her explanatory style. For Smithsonian magazine, she wrote a step-by-step guide on how to avoid misinformation about COVID-19, outlining expert-recommended checks readers can use to vet news and suggesting ways to respond when friends or family share false claims. That piece breaks complex ideas about information ecosystems into concrete actions, a template she brings to later explainers on research and policy.
Earlier in her career, she reported for a Washington-focused magazine on developments in political media, including a story on a progressive outlet hiring an editor to cover the future of the Democratic Party ahead of a presidential election cycle. That article tracks how shifts in newsroom staffing reflect broader changes inside “blue America,” linking personnel decisions to ideological currents and electoral strategy. Across outlets, she combines clear, utilitarian guidance with close attention to who holds influence in public conversations, whether the subject is pandemic misinformation, campus experts or political organizations.
Taken together, Thulin’s work shows a journalist who moves comfortably between institutional announcements, classroom portraits, historical explainers and service guides, always looking for the expertise and lived experience that reveal why a development matters beyond the campus gates.
4 more education journalists.
Abdul Latif Jameel
Abdul Latif Jameel publishes long-form, research-led pieces on how emerging technologies and scientific advances reshape education, industry, and society. He writes for the Abdul Latif Jameel masthead at the intersection of learning, innovation, and applied science, with a focus on technology, skills, and the future of learning. He explains complex fields such as quantum sensing in clear, accessible terms, breaking down frontier science and tying it to real-world applications. His coverage links breakthroughs in sensing, data, and automation to training, curriculum, and lifelong learning. He treats education as an applied system connected to industry, policy, infrastructure, and human development. He reports in an analytical, explanatory style, using research, pilots, and large-scale initiatives to examine how technologies are implemented, evaluated, and scaled in learning and training environments.
Adria Iraheta
Adria Iraheta is a community-focused reporter at Denver7, distinct for centering students, families and residents in every story about schools, neighborhoods and public services. She covers how decisions by school districts, local agencies and public institutions land in daily life, with a particular focus on Aurora and Arapahoe County. Her beat sits at the intersection of education, community issues, public services, safety, infrastructure, health and climate, from job cuts in a school district to a new transit safety app, DMV outages, street changes and record heat waves. With a decade of local television reporting experience, she reports on the ground in specific local scenes, using plain language, direct questions to officials and clear explanations to show how policies, programs and changes affect the people who live, study and work in Colorado communities.
Alan J. Borsuk
Alan J. Borsuk stands out for connecting what happens in schools to the policy and political decisions behind them. He writes in-depth K-12 education analysis for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and serves as a senior fellow in law and public policy at Marquette University Law School. His work focuses on Milwaukee Public Schools, school choice, literacy, teacher pipelines, and school accountability. He uses long-range perspective, detailed reporting, and structured analysis to explain how reforms unfold, why they stall, and what they mean for students and leaders. He has also written on vouchers, Teach for America, discipline, and teacher evaluation, drawing on decades as a reporter and editor on education and public policy.
Alexandra Hardle
Alexandra Hardle brings a watchdog lens to K-12 schools, using concrete incidents to map how district power, oversight and accountability work in real life. She covers K-12 education for The Arizona Republic, focusing on school systems, governance and the lived impact of policy on students, families and educators. Her reporting shows how school governance can fail students and staff and what that reveals about district culture. She often covers flashpoints, such as the Nazi salute fallout in the Deer Valley district, as windows into deeper dysfunction, tracking how leadership responds, how trust breaks down and how conflicts unfold in public meetings. Her work sits at the intersection of accountability reporting and community stories, grounded in public records, formal rules and multiple stakeholder perspectives, with clear, direct language that explains how institutions make decisions and how ordinary people experience them.