The Centre for Investigative Journalism

Raj Bairoliya

Chartered accountant and managing director of FTI Forensic Accounting, one of the leading City firms specialising in this type of investigation. The company is retained by law enforcement and regulatory agencies.

David Banisar

David Banisar is Director of the Freedom of Information Project of Privacy International in London. He is also a Non-Resident Fellow at the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford Law School and a Visiting Research Fellow at the School of Law, University of Leeds. He has served as an advisor and consultant to numerous organisations including the UN Development Programme, Representative on Freedom of the Media for the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, Justice Canada, the Open Society Institute, Article XIX and Consumers International. He has worked in the field of information policy for seventeen years and is the author of books, studies, and articles on freedom of information, freedom of expression and privacy.

Sheila Bird

Professor Sheila Bird is Principal Statistician at the Medical Research Council Biostatistics Unit. Her area of statistical expertise includes, VCJD and BSE epidemiology; incidence, progression and projection of blood-bone viruses (such as HIV and Hepatitis C); illegal drugs epidemiology, including in prisons; application of scientific method to criminal justice for injecting drug users and in determining cost-effective sentencing; database linkage, survival, quality of life and cost-effectiveness methods; statistics in medical journals; performance monitoring in the public services. Professor Bird chaired the Royal Statistical Society Working Party on Performance Monitoring in the Public Services (2003-06) whose report Performance Indicators: Good, Bad, and Ugly was published in late 2003. She is Honorary Officer for External Relations and an RSS Vice-President.

Heather Brooke

Heather Brooke is the author of Your Right to Know (Pluto Press), a guide to using the Freedom of Information Act. She was runner-up for the inaugural Paul Foot Award for Investigative Journalism and her project "Justice by postcode" for The Times was one of the first examples of computer-assisted reporting in the UK.

Heather Brooke teaches the FOI course for the National Union of Journalists and guest lectures at City University and the University of Westminster. She has talked about Freedom of Information and open government issues on a number of radio and television shows and writes articles for The Times, The Sunday Times, The Guardian, Daily Telegraph, The Independent, Evening Standard, New Statesman and other magazines.

Before moving to Britain, Heather Brooke worked in the US as a newspaper reporter covering state government and criminal justice. She used various US FOI laws to uncover politicians’ misuse of public funds for travel and personal election campaigning. In South Carolina, she uncovered flaws in the state’s forensic crime lab and exposed dangerous practices in funeral homes. Both investigations resulted in changes to state law.

Philip Conway

A senior partner at the London law firm of Davenport Lyons, who specialises in libel and media law. Davenport Lyons's high-profile clients include the Mirror newspaper and Express newspaper groups, as well as the satirical magazine Private Eye. Philip will be supported by other partners from the firm's media law department.

Nick Davies

Nick Davies has been named Journalist of the Year, Reporter of the Year and Feature Writer of the Year for his investigations into crime, drugs, poverty and other social issues. Flat Earth News, his expose of distortion and propaganda in the mainstream media, was released to widespread acclaim earlier this year. He has been a journalist since 1976, he writes regularly for The Guardian. He was the first winner of the Martha Gellhorn award for investigative reporting for his work on failing schools and recently won the award for European Journalism for his work on drugs policy.

David Donald

David Donald is training director for Investigative Reporters and Editors and for the National Institute for Computer-Assisted Reporting. In the past four years, he has coordinated and conducted more than 200 investigative and computer-assisted reporting workshops both in the United States and internationally for print, broadcast and online journalists.

An award-winning journalist, Donald oversaw the CAR and research programmes at the Savannah Morning News. He has taught at high school and college levels, including five years at Savannah State University. He holds a master's in journalism from Kent State University.

Later this summer, Donald will leave IRE and NICAR and join the Center for Public Integrity in Washington as data editor.

David Gordon

David Gordon is Investigations Correspondent for the Belfast Telegraph, where he has worked for seven years. He recently won a Northern Ireland press award for his in-depth coverage of the lobbying controversy that brought down Assembly Minister Ian Paisley Junior, and helped speed the resignation of his famous father as First Minister. David is also coordinating an "Open Stormont" campaign to push for more transparency on expenses and donations received by politicians in the province.

Solomon Hughes

Solomon Hughes is a freelance investigative reporter who has written for the Observer, Guardian and Independent and In These Times. His work also appears regularly in Private Eye magazine.

Mark Hunter

Mark Hunter is the only person to have won awards from Investigative Reporters and Editors for both his journalism and his research on journalism. His other journalism awards include the H.L. Mencken Free Press Award for work on government abuses, the Sigma Delta Chi Award for research on journalism, and the National Headliners and Clarion Awards for a series showing how an obscure US law created a population of handicapped children who were subsequently cut from welfare rolls. His work has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Washington Post, Columbia Journalism Review, Harvard International Journal of Press/Politics and elsewhere.

Mark Hunter's doctoral thesis, published by the Presses Universitaires de France as Le Journalisme d'investigation en France et aux Etats-Unis, was the first cross-cultural study of French and American investigative reporting methods. Among his other works are The Passions of Men: Work and Love in the Age of Stress (Putnam, 1988); the first unauthorised biography of Jack Lang (Les Jours les plus Lang, Odile Jacob, 1990); a case-cracking investigation into a murder case that implicated France's power elite, Le Destin de Suzanne: La Véritable affaire Canson (Fayard, 1995); an inside analysis of the French extreme right and its militant base, Un Américain au Front: Enqute au sein du Front National(Stock, 1998); and a documentary film on France's alcohol lobby (Chronique d'une campagne arrosée, Arte, 1999).

Mark Hunter is a founding member of the Global Investigative Journalism Network, an associate professor at the Institut Franais de Presse of the Université de Paris and an adjunct professor at INSEAD.

Francis Irving

Francis Irving is a 33-year-old computer programmer and campaigner living in Cambridge, UK. He is the founder of the website Public Whip, which lets anyone find out how their MP voted in the House of Commons. Francis now works at internet democracy charity mySociety. He was campaigns director of the Save Parliament campaign, which successfully lobbied against a dangerous Bill in 2006. He has previously worked as a programmer in numerous industries from computer games to industrial machine control software.

Tommy Kaas

Tommy Kaas has a background in print journalism. He was a co-founder of FCJ, the Organisation for Computer-Assisted Reporting, and the Danish International Centre for Analytical Reporting (Dicar).

From 2002-2006 he worked full time for Dicar. With Nils Mulvad he now runs "Kaas & Mulvad - Research and analysis". He has trained reporters and researchers in Denmark and several other countries.

Jeffrey Katz

Jeffrey Katz is a New Yorker who came to the UK 1968 to serve with an intelligence branch of the U.S. Air Force. He returned to the United States in 1973, completed an undergraduate degree and worked as a journalist. In 1979 he accepted a position as deputy editor of a British provincial newspaper.

In 1987 he was invited to join Kroll Associates in London and by 1995 he had become the company’s Director of European Operations. The following year he was named UK Country Head. He left Kroll Associates in 1998 and became Chief Executive of the Bishop Group in 1999, overseeing investigations that range from international money laundering to corporate corruption.

Greg Muttitt

Greg Muttitt is a Co-Director of PLATFORM, which monitors the human rights, environmental and development impacts of oil corporations. He has been researching Iraqi oil policy under the occupation since 2003, and his commentaries on the subject are well-known in Iraq and internationally. Prior to working on Iraq he focused on oil developments in Azerbaijan. Russia and Kazakhstan.

Paul Myers

Paul Myers joined the BBC in 1995 as a news information researcher. After joining the corporation's training division in 1999, he coined the term "blended learning" and developed unique approaches to training and research methodology. Having worked with computers since 1976, Paul has successfully introduced many technical tools into the world of journalism. He has also helped shape BBC editorial policy on Internet research.
Away from training, he has produced online chatrooms, presented items for Watchdog & Click Online and has provided assistance to Panorama, Radio Five Live and many other news, current affairs and consumer programmes.

Jim Nichol

Jim Nichol is a leading criminal solicitor who has specialised in investigating miscarriages of justice. His cases include the Bridgewater Four – released after 18 years in prison in 1997, except for Patrick Molloy who died while incarcerated; Eddie Browning (M50 murder of Marie Wilkes); the M25 Three; Donald Pendleton ( 16 years in prison); Stevie Johnston, and Colin Wallace.

John Pilger

John Pilger is a world-renowned journalist, author and documentary filmmaker. He has twice been named Journalist of the Year. Among a number of other awards, he has been International Reporter of the Year and winner of the UN Association Media Peace Prize. He made his name as foreign correspondent and a front-line war reporter, most notably from the conflicts in Vietnam, Cambodia and East Timor. Over decades he has made more than 60 campaigning documentaries for ITV, which have won Academy Awards in Britain and the United States. His latest book, Freedom Next Time, and feature-length film, The War On Democracy, were released last year.

Aron Pilhofer

Aron Pilhofer is editor of Interactive News Technology at The New York Times, overseeing a focused team of journalist-developers who build dynamic, data-driven applications to enhance The Times' reporting online. He joined The Times in 2005 as a projects editor on the paper's newly expanded computer-assisted reporting team, where he specialised in stories related to money, politics and influence for the politics desk and Washington bureau. Prior to this, Pilhofer was database editor at the Center for Public Integrity in Washington, where he began an ongoing project in 2002 to track 527 groups, a new form of political non-profit organisation. 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.

Paul Radu

Paul Cristian Radu, co-founded the Romanian Center for Investigative Journalism (RCIJ). He is a member of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists. In 2002 Paul was a Milena Jesenska Press fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna, Austria, where he researched transnational organized crime groups. He has investigated trafficking in the Balkans as well as the ties between various organized crime groups and the mining and energy sector in Romania. He won a 2004 Knight International Press Fellowship Award and was the coordinator of a cross-border investigative project that won the 2007 Global Shining Light award.

Raphael Rowe

Raphael Rowe's path to becoming an investigative journalist for BBC Panorama is extraodinary. He spent 12 years in prison before being freed, for crimes that he did not commit. Released aged 32, despite having very little training, he soon became a reporter for the BBC's flagship Radio 4 news programme Today. His determination to report the story propelled him onto the BBC six o'clock news. He went on to help launch BBC Three's TV current affairs programme the Third Degree.

Andy Rowell

Andy Rowell is an award-winning freelance writer and investigative journalist specialising in environmental and health issues. His books include: The Next Gulf: London, Washington and Oil Conflict in Nigeria, 2005, and Green Backlash – Global Subversion of the Environment Government, 1996. He writes for Alkhaleej, the second-largest selling Arabic newspaper in the Gulf. He is a Director of the non-profit company Public Interest Investigations that runs SpinWatch and NuclearSpin.

Mark Schapiro

Mark Schapiro, editorial director of the Center for Investigative Reporting in San Francisco has written extensively on foreign affairs. His work has appeared in Harper's, The Nation, The Atlantic Monthly and The New York Times Magazine. He is the author of Exposed: The Toxic Chemistry of Everydat Products: Who's at Risk and What's at Stake for American Power.

Vandana Shiva

Vandana Shiva is a world-renowned enviromental thinker and activist. In her latest book Stolen Harvest she tracks the impact of global, corporate agriculture on small farmers, the environment and the quality of the food we eat. Before becoming an activist she was one of India's leading physicists. navdanya.org

Drew Sullivan

Drew Sullivan is the founder of the Journalism Development Group LLC, a media development organisation with programs in the Balkans, Middle East and former Soviet states. He founded and was director and editor of the Center for Investigative Reporting in Sarajevo, an independent, regional investigative news organisation where he now serves as advisor. He is editor for the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Program. He worked as a city hall and investigative reporter for the Tennessean newspaper in Nashville, and as a data editor for the Associated Press Special Assignment Team in New York. He has served on the board of directors of Investigative Reporters and Editors and the National Institute for Computer-Assisted Reporting. Before becoming a journalist, he was a structural dynamicist on the Space Shuttle program for Rockwell International Space Systems. He is based in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Washington, D.C.

Dmitri Vitaliev

Dmitri Vitaliev is an independent consultant working in digital security and privacy for human rights activists and journalists. He has lead and participated in missions to Northern and Eastern Africa, Europe, Central Asia and North America. He has been a participant, presenter and panel member in the United Nations Summit on Information Society and the World Social Forum in Nairobi. Dmitri has run over 30 workshops in over two dozen countries teaching human rights activists and journalists about security on their computers and the internet. He is the author of Digital Security and Privacy for Human rights Defenders.

Justin Walford

Former legal manager for The Daily Express and The Sunday Express newspapers. He works now for The News of the World and The Sun.

Robert Wardle

Robert Wardle is a Solicitor who joined the Serious Fraud Office in 1988 on its foundation. After a spell as an Assistant Solicitor in private practice he worked as a Prosecuting Solicitor in Essex and Cambridgeshire and then for the Crown Prosecution Service. At the SFO he has worked as a Case Controller and was made an Assistant Director in 1992. On 31 December 2002 the Attorney General announced his appointment as Director and he took office on 21 April 2003. He retired from the post in April 2008.

Michael Warhurst

Dr Michael Warhurst has worked as the senior campaigner for the Resource Use team at Friends of the Earth since November 2005. He focuses on EU and UK waste and resources policy. He leads the Europe Waste and Resources campaign, including working on the revision of the EU’s main waste directive. Prior to 2005, he worked on chemicals policy, with a particular focus on the EU’s new REACH chemicals regulation, for Friends of the Earth and at WWF’s European Policy Office in Brussels. During 2005 he spent 9 months working on US chemicals policy at the Lowell Centre for Sustainable Production in Massachusetts, USA.