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Ethics & Justice Investigative 
  Journalism Fellowships

The Schuster Institute’s Ethics & Justice Investigative Journalism Fellowships are awarded to reporters whose ambitious projects are consistent with our journalistic mission: to investigate and report on important public issues of government and corporate accountability, social justice, or human rights.

Through this collaboration with highly qualified and motivated investigative reporters, the Schuster Institute is undertaking additional stories of significant public interest. Our unpaid Fellows are pursuing important projects on a variety of topics, each working to a high standard with intensely researched, carefully fact-checked work that can benefit from having an institutional home.

While these fellowships are unpaid, Ethics & Justice Investigative Journalism Fellows have access to Brandeis University’s databases and other online resources; some student research assistance, where appropriate; some editorial support, guidance, and promotion of the completed work, when needed; and the potential to have the background documents and research related to their work hosted on our website.

Journalists with a compelling project related to our core interests may write to us explaining how their work is related to ours, and how their work and ours would benefit from the affiliation.

Michael Blanding, Senior Fellow

Michael Blanding is an award-winning magazine writer who covers politics, social issues, and travel. His investigative journalism and travel reporting have taken him around the world. He has written for publications including The Nation, The New Republic, Salon.com, Consumers Digest, The Boston Globe Magazine, and Boston Magazine.

Madeline Drexler, Senior Fellow

Madeline Drexler is an award-winning journalist and author specializing in public health, medicine, and science. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Nation, The Los Angeles Times, The American Prospect, The New Republic Online, USA Today, The Journal of Life Sciences, Nieman Reports, Biosecurity and Bioterrorism, and many other national publications. Based in Boston, Drexler will focus her Schuster Ethics & Justice Investigative Fellowship on investigating food safety, biosecurity, and pandemic preparedness—topics which she has covered widely in recent years. She is the editor of the Harvard Public Health Review.

E.J. Graff, Senior Fellow

As an author and journalist, Graff has written widely about such issues as corruption in international adoption, discrimination and violence against women and children, marriage and family, and lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender civil rights issues. Her widely praised work is often cited in legal journals, reprinted for use in academic courses and textbooks, entered as courtroom exhibits, and quoted by government policymaking bodies.

Jan Goodwin, Senior Fellow

Jan Goodwin is an award-winning journalist and author whose career has been committed to investigating abuses of social justice and human rights, both international and domestic, on topics that include honor killings, child soldiers, the Soviets’ Afghan war, and restorative justice projects. In many of the nations from which Goodwin reports, journalists risk censorship, incarceration, and even death. She has written for such publications as The New York Times Magazine, The Nation, Harper's Bazaar, More Magazine, Marie-Claire, O, the Oprah Magazine, Reader's Digest, Family Circle, Good Housekeeping, Ladies' Home Journal, Redbook, Glamour, New York Magazine, Discover, Self, and Utne Reader. She is a Contributing Editor for More Magazine and a Senior International Editor for Marie-Claire Magazine.

Kalpana Jain, Senior Fellow

Kalpana Jain is a pioneering reporter whose primary expertise is public health and healthcare issues in East Asia and her home country of India. Before becoming a freelance reporter, Jain spent eighteen years at The Times of India as a journalist and health editor. Jain has covered controversial and taboo topics such as female feticide and the unbalanced sex ratio between boys and girls, HIV/AIDS in India, ethics in the medical industry, and corruption among pharmaceutical companies and doctors.  

As well as continuing her investigation into health and healthcare issues, Jain will focus her attention on modern slavery and human trafficking in India as part of her Ethics & Justice Investigative Journalism Fellowship at the Schuster Institute. 

Andrew Kreig, Senior Fellow

Justice Integrity Project Executive Director Andrew Kreig  has two decades experience as an attorney and non-profit executive in Washington, D.C. An author and longtime investigative reporter, his primary focus since 2008 has been exploring allegations of official corruption and other misconduct in federal agencies. He has been a consultant and volunteer leader in advising several non-profit groups fostering cutting-edge applications within the communications industries. As president and CEO of the Wireless Communications Association International (WCAI) from 1996 until 2008, Kreig led its worldwide advocacy that helped create the broadband wireless industry.

Erin Siegal, Fellow

Erin Siegal has recently publisher her first book, "Finding Fernanda: Two Mothers, One Child, and a Cross-Border Search for the Truth," (Cathexis Press, 2011). The book investigates corrupt practices in international adoption between Guatemala and the United States by examining the criminal network involved in one case of child kidnapping for international adoption. Siegal was a 2008-2009 fellow at the Toni Stabile Center for Investigative Journalism at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, where her Master’s thesis earned honors. Her photojournalism has appeared in the New York Times, Time magazine, Rolling Stone, and many other magazines and newspapers.