About Us
Leadership
Khushbu Shah
Editor in Chief
Khushbu Shah is the Editor in Chief of The Fuller Project, overseeing and implementing the editorial agenda and the newsroom’s groundbreaking reporting on women to expose injustice and spur accountability. She also leads partnerships with a myriad of prestigious U.S. and international outlets.
Khushbu brings deep expertise on the interconnected issues impacting women and their communities to the Editor in Chief role, where she upholds the highest standards of The Fuller Project’s unbiased, non-partisan, rigorous journalism.
In 2016 Khushbu was the producer for CNN Correspondent Ed Lavandera covering the Charlotte, North Carolina protests after police shot a Black man sitting in his car, reporting which won the Murrow Award in 2017. As the sole producer on site for the investigative team reporting on the undercounted deaths and recovery efforts in Puerto Rico from Hurricane Maria in 2017, her team won the 2018 Murrow Award, and was nominated for the Peabody award. She was editor and producer for three CNN Emmy-nominated teams for breaking news coverage in Ukraine in 2014, Typhoon Haiyan in 2015 and network-wide Hurricane coverage in 2018.
Khushbu reports on the intersection of race, politics and social justice, writing regularly for outlets such as The Guardian, The Washington Post, The Lily, Pacific Standard and Columbia Journalism Review, amongst others. Her in-depth reporting on police brutality in the U.S. has brought light to the stories of families and mothers of Black men and women killed by police. In her reported series on the killing of Ahmaud Arbery for The Guardian, she obtained 911 calls and the resignation letter of a district attorney assigned to the case, and examined in-depth the breakdown of the criminal justice system following Arbery’s death in Brunswick, Georgia.
Her reporting exposes injustices impacting women, ranging from abortion access in the South to and immigration and inequality across Latin America. She spent months after the November 2016 election crisscrossing the United States interviewing Americans who had voted for President Trump from Washington to Wyoming for CNN. In 2018, Khushbu profiled a pregnant mother and her children and the transgender women making their way to the U.S. amid the migrant caravan traveling via Tijuana on the border with Mexico.
Prior to joining The Fuller Project, Khushbu spent over a decade at prominent media outlets including CNN, BBC, NPR/PBS-licensed stations and multiple networks. She began her career as an editor at age 24 in Afghanistan where she led a team of 25 researchers for Moby Group, a news and entertainment group that now reaches 300 million. A member of both the South American Journalists Association and the Asian American Journalists Association, she has worked from Afghanistan, India, the West Bank, Venezuela, Mexico and across the United States and now resides in Atlanta, Georgia. She is a grantee of The International Women’s Media Fund for reporting on undocumented South Asian female immigrants in the U.S.
Khushbu speaks Spanish, Gujarati and basic Arabic. She has a B.A. from The University of California, Berkeley and was awarded a Masters of Science from The London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE).
Recent reporting by Khushbu:
Mothers of Black Americans killed by police speak out – The Guardian
Reported series on police brutality and Ahmaud Arbery – The Guardian
Our dad is dead: the families left behind after police shootings – The Guardian
Motel Industry Turmoil Blocks Indian-American Path to Prosperity – Bloomberg Businessweek
How racism and poverty made Detroit a new coronavirus hot spot – Vox
When Your Family Spreads Misinformation – The Atlantic
Kimberly Abbott
Chief Communications Officer
Kimberly Abbott is the Chief Communications Officer of The Fuller Project, where she amplifies the organization’s strategic priorities including public relations and events, ensuring the newsroom’s groundbreaking reporting on women reaches diverse audiences worldwide.
Kimberly draws on her deep experience of expanding the impact of mission-driven organizations. She has 25 years of success overseeing global communications, media training, public relations, foreign policy, and journalism with a particular focus on underreported humanitarian issues in post-conflict situations.
Kimberly started her career as a broadcast journalist and has worked as a booker, writer, producer and reporter. During Kimberly’s seven-year tenure at CNN, she covered breaking news around the country from the 2000 Presidential Election and recount to 9/11, and was an on-air reporter for “CNN Newsroom”, filing stories from D.C., Bosnia, and Germany. Her first job was reporting for local radio covering education and government. Her journalism has also included France 3 television, Radio France, and BFM Radio in Paris.
Prior to joining The Fuller Project, Kimberly was Vice President of Marketing and Communications for World Learning, a global development, exchange and education nonprofit. There, Kimberly established a rigorous digital media strategy that included the overhaul of multiple websites and the tripling of social media traffic to drive business growth. She also conducted media training for women around the world and created journalism fellowship programs in South Africa and India that enabled young journalists to gain international reporting experience.
At World Learning, Kimberly launched a communications department and led a team of 18 to drive brand awareness and elevate the importance of individual programs, including that of The Fulbright Specialist. Her work drove recognition of a range of development programs, from teaching Syrian refugees in Lebanon to STEM education in Egypt. She produced professional videos that won several awards, including four Gold, one Silver, and three Bronze Telly Awards. Her robust content production resulted in earned media placements in PBS NewsHour, Christian Science Monitor, Inside Higher Ed, US News & World Report, AARP, and many local outlets.
While Communications Director for North America at the International Crisis Group, an independent, nongovernmental organization, Kimberly was responsible for developing strategic approaches for communicating its policy prescriptions. This included partnering to create news reports with legacy media outlets such as “60 Minutes”, “Nightline” and “PBS NewsHour” to cover underreported stories in Darfur, DRC and Northern Uganda, and producing multimedia that enhanced the visibility of the organization as a highly recognized, go-to source for news and analysis on conflict situations. Her podcasts and stories about Crisis Group reports appeared in Foreign Policy, The Christian Science Monitor, CNN Global Public Square and Huffington Post. She produced over a dozen documentaries about Crisis Group’s impact, including “Crisis Group On the Frontlines”, which was a finalist for the CINE Golden Eagle Award, and interviewed global leaders including U.S. President Bill Clinton, French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner, Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo, and U.S. General Colin Powell.
At InterAction, an alliance of international development and humanitarian NGOs, Kimberly served as Acting Communications Director and successfully brought attention to lesser known humanitarian and development stories, while collaborating with InterAction’s 160 member organizations to develop media and advocacy campaigns on collective humanitarian and development priorities.
She has been a term member of the Council on Foreign Relations and is the recipient of numerous fellowships in journalism and international affairs, from the Radio Television News Directors Foundation, German Marshall Fund, Atlantik-Brucke German-American Foundation, French American Foundation, and others. Her career has also included time on Capitol Hill, in U.S. presidential politics, and as an envoy and translator for the Centennial Olympic Games.
A French speaker, Kimberly earned a Bachelor of Science in broadcast journalism from Boston University and studied French media at the Ecole Française des Attachés de Presse in Paris. She now lives in Maryland with her husband and son.
Lilian Tan
Chief Operating Officer
Lilian Tan is the Chief Operating Officer of The Fuller Project — focused on strategy, operations, institution building and culture — ensuring the organization’s groundbreaking reporting on women reaches diverse audiences around the world. Lilian collaborates closely with the internal Fuller team, along with editors and partners working on women and journalism to boost the success and impact of our reporting.
Lilian is an experienced strategy and operations professional with a focus on socially conscious organizations. She has worked across Fortune 500 companies, Forbes 100 largest non-profits, high growth startups, Corporate Social Responsibility departments, and educational institutions to help them grow in a financially sustainable manner and support their missions.
Before joining The Fuller Project, Lilian worked as a management consultant for Grant Thornton’s Not-for-Profit & Higher Education Advisory practice, one of the largest in the country. There, she advised a range of organizations focused on humanitarian needs, social services, foundations, health, and education as they sought to revise their long-term strategies to ensure maximum impact. She also directed them in how to best evaluate investments in new programs and services to meet their beneficiaries’ needs and assess and improve their fundraising, operations, human relations, finance, and technology practices to promote sustainable and effective growth.
Most recently, Lilian lived and worked in Kampala, Uganda for an organization focused on providing renewable energy and financially inclusive products to more than 600,000 low-income rural households in Uganda, Zambia, Nigeria, Benin, Côte d’Ivoire, and Mozambique. She has worked with organizations including USAID, Save the Children, Open Society Foundation, Rotary International, National Marrow Donor Program, World Bank, Signify Foundation, and UNICEF.
Lilian received her Master of Business Administration from New York University, where she was a Forté Foundation Fellow, and her Bachelor of Arts and Bachelor of Business Administration from The University of Texas at Austin. She is now based at The Fuller Project headquarters in Washington, D.C., and, when not working, Lilian enjoys hiking, camping, running, and relaxing behind her piano or a good book.
Sophia Jones
Global Editor
Sophia Jones is the Global Editor for The Fuller Project, leading a global team of reporters dedicated to investigative and groundbreaking journalism on issues impacting women and their communities, raising awareness on under-reported stories, exposing injustice and sparking action. She is also the founding reporter on The Fuller Project team and plays a central and driving role in building the newsroom.
Sophia is an award-winning journalist and editor who has reported extensively across the Middle East, South Asia, Africa, Europe, and the United States. Through Sophia’s reporting on the role of women in peace and conflict, she has explored how gender dynamics shape our world today.
In 2019, Sophia received an award from the Military Reporters and Editors Association for her reporting in The New York Times Magazine on Afghan women in the security forces, examining the complicated, expensive, and controversial U.S.-led NATO effort to recruit, train and keep them alive. This reporting spurred the Afghan Ministry of Interior Affairs and the Ministry of Defense to advance their sexual harassment policies, and the NATO-led Resolute Support mission announced it was reassessing its recruitment approach of Afghan women to ensure their safety.
Sophia’s journalism routinely breaks new ground in media coverage, highlighting critical gender dimensions, from how climate change in Afghanistan is leading to child marriage and threatening future prospects for peace, to the lack of justice for the wives of ISIS fighters and their children in Iraq.
Sophia’s four-part series on sham virginity testing in the U.S. and globally for Marie Claire, which included a New York doctor admitting on record to performing the abusive practice despite there being no medical basis, led to immediate impact. The week after her investigation, the rapper T.I. addressed the issue on a podcast, saying he forced his daughter to undergo virginity tests. Sophia’s rigorous reporting underpinned subsequent coverage by dozens of news outlets, and contributed to a reckoning in social media and within the medical community. In response, the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology published a first-ever statement about the sham practices, and New York State and California introduced legislation to ban hymen exams. Shortly after publication, medical professionals in the Philippines told The Fuller Project they officially halted the practice of hymen exams, an invasive procedure that previously allowed doctors in government-funded clinics to issue phony virginity cards to women in the sex trade so pimps could charge more.
She conceived and edited a multi-award winning series in 2018 with ELLE UK on women fighting for rights around the world. One of the articles she edited focused on a squad of policewomen in India investigating and responding to rape. Following publication, the police chief running the program petitioned for more funding and the program expanded to several other Indian states, reportedly employing some 400 policewomen.
Sophia’s reporting from Afghanistan was shortlisted for the Biedler Prize for Cancer Journalism and the South Asian Journalists Association’s Daniel Pearl Award for outstanding reporting from South Asia. She was a 2017 grantee of the Fund for Investigative Journalism, European Journalism Centre, and Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, and a 2019 grantee with the National Geographic Society.
Sophia has written and reported for The New York Times Magazine, Marie Claire Magazine, Politico, Foreign Policy, TIME, Foreign Affairs, The Atlantic, NPR, Public Radio International, Elle, Glamour Magazine, SIERRA Magazine, The Christian Science Monitor, The Daily Beast, The New Republic, Reuters, and others. Prior to joining The Fuller Project in 2017, Sophia served as HuffPost’s Middle East correspondent from 2013-2016. Before that, she worked as a freelance journalist.
Sophia is certified in battlefield medical aid and trained to safely and responsibly report from conflict zones. She has reported from Iraq, Afghanistan, Turkey, Egypt, Tunisia, Jordan, Lebanon, Israel, the West Bank and Gaza, South Africa, Ghana, Greece, Russia, Macedonia, Serbia, Hungary, Germany, and the United States.
She currently lives in Barcelona with her husband and their rescue dog, Carmelo.
Recent reporting by Sophia:
In Afghanistan, Climate Change Threatens Future Prospects for Peace – National Geographic
Xanthe Scharff, PhD
Cofounder and Chief Executive Officer
[ZAN-thee SHARRF]
Dr. Scharff is the CEO and Cofounder of The Fuller Project, a nonprofit organization dedicated to groundbreaking reporting on women worldwide that raises awareness, exposes injustice and spurs accountability.
Under her leadership, The Fuller Project has evolved from a grassroots start-up to the global newsroom dedicated to reporting on women and publishing with leading outlets. Since its cofounding in 2015 from Turkey, The Fuller Project newsroom has won various accolades including the Military Reporters & Editors Award, the One World Media Award, the Amnesty International Media Award, the Milwaukee Press Club Silver Award; reporting has also been shortlisted for the Biedler Prize for Cancer Journalism, One World Media Award, South Asia Journalism Association Daniel Pearl Award, and the National Society of Newspaper Columnists Award.
At The Fuller Project, Xanthe heads an organization that includes several dozen editors, reporters, global contributors, and senior business leaders. The team’s reporting has spurred the introduction of new legislation to protect women and girls in the U.S., the hiring of hundreds of policewomen in India, the banning of virginity testing in state hospitals in The Philippines, and much more. She has raised nearly $25 million for The Fuller Project and other nonprofits that raise the voices of women and girls, and she has led The Fuller Project through year-on growth, more than tripling organizational resources between 2019 and 2020. In 2021, Xanthe was awarded the Helen Gurley Brown Genius Grant for her visionary leadership in bringing to light groundbreaking stories affecting women.
Xanthe is an award-winning nonprofit founder and journalist whose reporting has been featured in Newsweek, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, and beyond. During the coronavirus pandemic, she was among the first to write about the disproportionate impact of the economic crisis on women in a major U.S. news outlet (TIME). Xanthe then called for a federal release of data to better inform policies in The Boston Globe. She and her team reported based on exclusive statistics received from 17 state agencies to show women as the majority of unemployment seekers in all states. Over a dozen journalism outlets including The New York Times sourced The Fuller Project’s data reporting, which led the national news cycle three weeks ahead of federal data releases.
In 2019, Xanthe was named among the top 40 under 40 by the Leadership Center for Excellence for outstanding public service. Xanthe is the Founder and Board Chair Emeritus of Advancing Girls’ Education in Africa, a thriving nonprofit in East Africa which has served 3,000 girls with secondary school opportunities. The UN gave AGE Africa a good practice award, and Michelle Obama endorsed the organization’s work. CBS’s The Early Show, Voice of America, The Christian Science Monitor, and several African media outlets. The nonprofit named the Xanthe Scharff Workplace Experience project in her honor.
Formerly, Xanthe was the Associate Director at the Center for Universal Education at Brookings where she led research and programming on girls’ education. There, she published extensively and edited a volume on girls’ education, built a partnership with Brookings India, and facilitated a network of 60 global foundations. She was an Education Pioneers Fellow and a Peace Scholar at the United States Institute of Peace during her investigation into government and donor failures to support the survivors of a devastating 20-year war in Northern Uganda.
The Fletcher School awarded Xanthe her doctorate in International Relations for research on post-conflict education, during which she was named Minear Fellow, Earhart Fellow, Henry Leir Fellow, and was an Active Citizenship Fellow. She was also a D.C. Education Fellow and worked at the District of Columbia Public Schools. She is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and she has worked with organizations including The World Bank, United Nations, Arabella Advisors, CARE, and Save the Children. Xanthe graduated with honors from New York University and completed executive education courses at Harvard Business School and the Kennedy School at Harvard.
Xanthe serves on the Board of Advisors of The War Horse, an award-winning nonprofit newsroom that supports military spouses and educates the public on military service, having herself been a military spouse during numerous 9/11 deployments. Having lived in Argentina and Peru, Xanthe speaks Spanish. She has also lived and worked in Turkey, Uganda, Sudan, and Malawi and now leads The Fuller Project’s headquarters in Washington, D.C., where she lives with her two children. If not working, you can find her running, reading, or heading to the woods.
Recent Reporting by Xanthe:
Federal Government Needs to Change How it Releases Unemployment Data – Boston Globe
Team
Alison Anderson
Head of Finance
Alison Anderson is the Head of Finance for The Fuller Project, where she helps ensure the organization delivers on its mission of breaking new ground in journalism to raise awareness and expose the injustices surrounding women and their communities. Alison works closely with members of The Fuller team around the world to efficiently manage the organization’s finances and budget, and to assist the COO in strategic efforts to boost the success and impact of reporting.
Alison is a highly-skilled finance professional with over fifteen years of experience. Her speciality is helping nonprofit mission-driven organizations thrive. As a consultant, Alison’s financial expertise has assisted in growing numerous international, women-focused nonprofits, including Nadia’s Initiative, Komera, Advancing Girls’ Education in Africa, and Free to Run. Previously, Alison was the General Manager of New Repertory Theatre in Watertown, MA and the Manager of Operations at Grantmakers for Organizations in Washington, D.C.
She is an alumna of Davidson College and Carnegie Mellon’s Heinz School of Public Policy and Management. She currently lives in Chattanooga, TN with her husband, three children, and two cats. She enjoys gardening, podcasts, and very rare moments of peace.
Amie Ferris-Rotman
Contributing Editor
Amie Ferris-Rotman is a contributing editor at The Fuller Project. A seasoned foreign correspondent, Amie has spent much of her 15-year career exposing injustices and raising awareness of underreported stories surrounding women and their communities.
She has dedicated years of coverage to Russia and the surrounding region, most recently as the Moscow correspondent for The Washington Post. Before, she led coverage on the country for Foreign Policy and was a staff reporter at The Wall Street Journal and Reuters.
In 2020, she was honored by the Human Rights Press Awards for her investigation into the sexual violations of ethnic Kazakh women by Chinese authorities at the so-called “re-education camps” in Xinjiang. In a series of articles on the Russian women battling President Vladimir Putin’s macho populism, she trailed the lawyers and survivors of abuse fighting for a #MeToo reckoning in Russia. In 2019, after reporting on the covert activists campaigning for the conviction of policemen in a gang rape in central Russia, the Kremlin broke its silence on the case and the accused were later given jail sentences, setting a precedent. Her story on Russia’s decriminalization of domestic violence was part of a multi-award winning series in 2018 for ELLE UK.
Between 2011-2013, Amie lived in Kabul, Afghanistan, as senior correspondent for Reuters during the U.S. troop surge. Her reporting focused on Afghan women, examining Western efforts to build a female police force and the disproportionate toll of drug addiction on women. Her story on a woman’s public execution near Kabul by the Taliban spurred the government and NATO to conduct independent investigations into the killing.
In 2015, frustrated with the dearth of Afghan women in the international news corps in Kabul, Amie founded Sahar Speaks, a program providing training, mentoring and publishing opportunities for Afghan female reporters. This won her the 2016 Georgina Henry Award for Digital Innovation, a British Press Award. To date, 23 women have undergone training and been published in The Huffington Post and The Guardian. A year after its founding, The New York Times Kabul bureau hired a Sahar Speaks alumna, indelibly altering the Afghan media landscape.
Amie is a 2014 John S. Knight Journalism Fellow at Stanford University, a 2013 Kiplinger Fellow at Ohio State University and a grantee of the International Women’s Media Foundation and the International Reporting Project, for reporting on Russia’s anti-abortion campaign and women’s health in Nepal.
She has reported from over 15 countries and written op-eds for The New York Times and Haaretz, and reported for The Atlantic, Politico, and The Guardian, amongst others.
Amie holds a bachelor and Masters degree in Russian studies from University College London.
She currently lives in London with her husband and their son.
Recent reporting by Amie:
Corinne Redfern
Contributing Reporter
Corinne Redfern is a multi-award winning foreign correspondent focused on investigative reporting that raises awareness of issues impacting women and their communities, exposes injustice and leads to accountability.
In 2019, Corinne won an Amnesty Media Award for her feature for ELLE magazine (UK), which followed the story of a 19 year-old whose husband had sold her to one of Bangladesh’s numerous ‘brothel villages’. The feature was also shortlisted for a One World Media Award.
Corinne has also won a BSME Award for her reporting on the Syrian refugee crisis for Marie Claire (UK) magazine, and a PPA Award for her role at Time Inc (UK), where she headed up a team of journalists reporting on international issues affecting women, including the Israel-Palestine conflict and Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines. She has been a finalist for a UNHCR Award, a Devex Award and a PPA Award for Writer of the Year.
Corinne is based in Southeast Asia, reporting for The Fuller Project on untold stories around trafficking and gender inequality. She has reported from over 20 countries in four continents, including investigating the links between child marriage and sex trafficking in Bangladesh, maternal health and malnutrition across West Africa, and exploring the impact of conflict on women during the Mosul siege in Iraq.
In 2017, Corinne’s reporting on underage girls in a Bangladeshi brothel assisted in the rescue and release of 20 adolescent girls, while her ongoing investigation into trafficking in the region has led non-governmental organizations to update their programming and factor child marriage into their country-wide trafficking response. Corinne’s reporting has also led to impact on the official level. Following her coverage on the high rate of suicide amongst girls and women working in brothels in Bangladesh, and a ban on their public burials, one local government began allowing sex workers to arrange formal funerals. In the Philippines, less than one month after Corinne reported (with The Fuller Project’s Sophia Jones) on sham virginity testing for Marie Claire magazine, local medical professionals said they had ended the practice.
Corinne’s reporting on trafficking has been featured on PBS News and ABC Australia.
Prior to joining The Fuller Project in 2019, Corinne was Acting Features Director at Marie Claire (UK). Her reporting has been published in The Washington Post, The Guardian, Foreign Policy, BBC, The Daily Telegraph and many others.
Recent reporting by Corinne:
Bangladesh’s Child Marriage Problem Is the World’s Human Trafficking Crisis – Foreign Policy
The living hell of young girls enslaved in Bangladesh’s brothels – The Guardian
‘I’m Too Tired To Cry’: The Laotian Girls Who Are Kidnapped To Become Child Brides – The Lily
Jenna Krajeski
Reporter
Jenna Krajeski is a reporter with The Fuller Project, where her groundbreaking reporting on women raises awareness and exposes injustice. Jenna’s work on female trafficking and exploitation has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, and Foreign Policy, and has been featured onThe Leonard Lopate Show, On The Media and the Slate podcast “What Next”. Other work has appeared in Slate magazine, the Virginia Quarterly Review, the World Policy Journal, the Atlantic, and the Smithsonian Magazine, among other publications.
Jenna’s piece on trafficking and immigration under the Trump administration for The New Yorker Radio Hour was nominated for a Dart Award and a Gracie Award. She was a 2016 Knight-Wallace fellow in journalism at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and in 2019 became a visiting lecturer in the Global Affairs department of Yale University.
Jenna is the author, with Nobel Laureate Nadia Murad, of Ms. Murad’s memoir “The Last Girl: My Story of Captivity and My Fight Against the Islamic State” and the co-author of a forthcoming book about Congo, Rwanda, and the refugee crisis.
Prior to joining The Fuller Project, Jenna was based in Cairo, Egypt where she was the Arts and Culture Editor of the English-language version of Egyptian newspaper Al-Masry Al-Youm, where she reported on art, politics, and the Egyptian revolution that overthrew Hosni Mubarak. In late 2011, she moved to Istanbul, Turkey where for four years with the support of the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, she focused on the Kurdish minority in southeastern Turkey, northern Iraq, and northeastern Syria, as well as the shifting politics and growing authoritarianism in Turkey.
She is currently based in Queens, New York.
Recent reporting by Jenna:
What the World Loses if Turkey Destroys the Syrian Kurds – The New York Times
Trump’s Human Trafficking Record Is Fake News – Foreign Policy
The Hypocrisy of Trump’s Anti-Trafficking Argument for a Border Wall – The New Yorker
Jessica Klein
Contributing Reporter
Jessica Klein is a journalist covering intimate partner and domestic violence, blockchain technology, and sex work (among other things). Outlets including The Atlantic, The New York Times, The Guardian, and Fortune have published her work, and she writes a monthly column for the National Bulletin on Domestic Violence Prevention.
In 2016, she coauthored Abetting Batterers: What Police, Prosecutors, and Courts Aren’t Doing to Protect America’s Women, updated in 2020. With The Fuller Project, she’s reported on how intimate partner abusers weaponize the U.S. court system and the obstacles Indigenous abuse survivors face when it comes to voting confidentially in U.S. elections.
Jessica Washington
Reporter
Jessica Washington is a reporter with The Fuller Project focused on women and health, especially as it relates to the coronavirus. She raises awareness of issues impacting women and their communities to expose injustice.
Before joining The Fuller Project, Jessica covered reproductive health for Mother Jones, publishing over 50 articles with a focus on access to care, the judiciary and state policies. Prior to working at Mother Jones, she worked for “All in With Chris Hayes” as a production assistant and digital content producer.
Her work has appeared in Mother Jones, NBC News,MSNBC, NBC News.com, and in The Daily Pennsylvanian.
Jessica graduated from the University of Pennsylvania where she was a staff writer for The Daily Pennsylvanian covering the diversity beat and focusing on race, religion, gender, and sexuality in relation to politics and campus dynamics. She is now based in Washington, D.C.
Recent reporting by Jessica:
What to Expect When You’re Expecting—During a Pandemic – Mother Jones
Katerina Ang
Contributing Editor, Asia
Katerina Ang is a journalist and contributing editor for The Fuller Project, where she assigns and edits stories on women’s political, economic and civil rights in Asia and the Pacific. She has extensive experience reporting on LGBTQIA+ and labor issues in the U.S. and Southeast Asia and covered the 2016 and 2018 U.S. elections, as well as the 2020 parliamentary campaigns in New Zealand and Singapore.
She was previously a founding editor at Vogue Business, a global fashion business publication run out of Condé Nast’s London headquarters, and helped create its Shanghai-based Mandarin-language edition. Between 2016 and 2019, she worked as an editor and reporter at The Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones in New York, focusing on real estate, personal finance and women’s interest stories. She was among the first out-of-state reporters to cover the gubernatorial run of Stacey Abrams in Georgia and broke stories on the national response to North Carolina’s anti-transgender “bathroom bill.”
Katerina has written hundreds of articles on everything from French literature to Chinese dissident activism and migrant worker protests for publications including the Financial Times, the International New York Times, the Washington Post, Nikkei Asia, Monocle, American Esquire and Women’s Wear Daily.
A native of Singapore, she also speaks Mandarin Chinese and French. She graduated with a degree in history from Columbia University in New York.
Lisa Tozzi
Contributing Editor
Lisa Tozzi is a longtime journalist and a contributing editor for The Fuller Project. Lisa has more than two decades of journalism experience, much of that spent working collaboratively with others to create great projects and develop outstanding teams of reporters and editors. At The New York Times, she led the early efforts to transform that legendary newsroom into a digital-focused operation. As Global News Director, she helped to build BuzzFeed’s early organization and oversaw its breaking news operation. She was also part of The Markup’s successful launch last year. This has all given her a deep appreciation for every aspect of the process of quality newsgathering, presentation, and distribution, and the role journalism plays in helping change peoples’ lives.
Louise Donovan
Reporter
Louise Donovan is an award-winning reporter based in East Africa, where she works closely with the editorial team of Kenya’s largest newspaper, The Daily Nation, raising awareness of issues impacting women and exposing injustices. Louise manages The Fuller Project’s strategic partnership with The Daily Nation and teams up with Kenyan journalists to cross-publish stories in both African and international outlets.
A European Journalism Centre grantee in 2017 and 2018, Louise was named a ‘30 Under 30’ rising star by the Professional Publishers Association in 2019. That year, she also won the One World Media award for her India reporting. In 2020, Louise’s work examining the deadly consequences of curbing reproductive rights in Kenya was shortlisted for the Anthony Shahid Award for Journalism Ethics.
Louise’s groundbreaking reporting has taken her across the globe. In Kenya, she investigated the issue of dumped foetuses and how restricted access to prenatal care, contraception and reproductive services is leaving women in increasingly desperate situations. Her reporting shone a light on an often overlooked but growing problem.
She embedded with an all-female biker squad who fight sexual violence in Jaipur, North India for a story with ELLE UK. One year after the story’s publication, the local government rolled out seven further women-only police units, created over 400 jobs for female officers and dedicated nearly three-quarters of a million dollars to buy extra equipment. More recently, she reported on a Ugandan woman’s experience of domestic violence during Covid-19 restrictions, which led to a women’s organisation reaching out to offer the single mother support.
Previously the Deputy Digital Editor of ELLE UK, Louise edited the multiple award-winning Warrior series published in partnership with The Fuller Project. Louise’s work appears in outlets such as CNN, Guardian, Foreign Policy and The Telegraph.
Recent reporting by Louise:
A Transport Ban in Uganda Means Women are Trapped at Home With Their Abusers – CNN
Sex Workers’ Dilemma amid Covid-19 – The Daily Nation
‘You Are Beautiful’: the Kenyan Beauty Parlour Serving Female Heroin Users – The Guardian
Lucy Sherriff
Contributing Reporter
Lucy Sherriff is a contributing reporter with The Fuller Project focusing on gender through an environmental lens. Her work has appeared in TIME, BBC, Al Jazeera, The Washington Post and NBC, to name a few. She lives in LA, where she focuses on environmental justice in the American West, covering the topic through print, film and radio. Lucy was previously based in Colombia, where her multimedia coverage of how climate change impacted indigenous tribes won her a United Nations Correspondents’ Association award in 2019.
Maher Sattar
Contributing Editor
Maher Sattar is an award-winning journalist and contributing editor at The Fuller Project. Maher’s career has spanned broadcast, print, and digital reporting, with a decade covering South and Southeast Asia for outlets such as The New York Times, Al Jazeera, and The Washington Post. He has reported extensively on the climate crisis, migration and refugees, politics, and the international labor movement, with a particular focus on how women – such as Bangladeshi garment workers – organize for their rights in these arenas.
Before moving to New York, Maher was a lead reporter on the Washington Post’s Ivanka Inc project, taking a sweeping look at the women being exploited throughout the Ivanka Trump brand’s global supply chain. Since then he has covered the 2020 US primaries and general election for CBS News, and won a Webby for a documentary investigating organ traffickers targeting refugees in the Middle East. He began his journalism career as a local fixer on Water World, PBS NOW’s Headliner award-winning documentary on the impact of climate change in Bangladesh.
Mariyah Espinoza
Communications Associate
Mariyah Espinoza is a communications associate with The Fuller Project, providing administrative support to the communications team by handling multiple projects from managing content on the website to organizing and maintaining marketing materials.
She conducts in-depth research to help measure and assess the impact of The Fuller Project’s work and and helps with external communication development.
She also builds media contact lists to reach target markets and communicates with external partners to assist in helping The Fuller Project reach new audiences.
Mariyah recently graduated from American University where she received her master’s degree in journalism and public affairs. Prior to that, she received her bachelor’s degree in mass communications at Bethune-Cookman University.
Before joining The Fuller Project, Mariyah interned at WNDB, a local news station in Daytona Beach and was a 2018 Bloomberg journalism fellow in San Francisco. In 2019, Mariyah became a top undergraduate researcher in the state of Florida after investigating how college students use social media to consume the news. This past year, she’s worked as a communications assistant for the School of Communication’s Diversity and Inclusion Team at AU.
Mariyah specializes in multimedia projects, with some of her most recent work consisting of a documentary that focused on health care inequality and covering stories that dealt with social justice issues.
She’s originally from Las Vegas, Nevada; however, she prefers to live on the East Coast. In her free time, Mariyah loves to travel, read mystery novels and try new food.
Rikha Sharma Rani
Contributing Editor
Rikha Sharma Rani is a journalist and contributing editor for The Fuller Project, where her groundbreaking reporting raises awareness of issues impacting women and their communities. She has reported extensively on immigration, human trafficking, and women’s health. She also edits The Fuller Project’s monthly column in Foreign Policy Magazine, which is dedicated to the impact of U.S. foreign policy on the world’s women.
Rikha was awarded “Silver” in the Consumer Category by the Milwaukee Press Club for her co-reported investigation into the impact of Catholic hospital care on reproductive services in Wisconsin.
Her reporting on the homeschooling challenges facing non-English speaking families during Covid-19 was widely read among educators and featured as a “Lesson of the Day” in The New York Times. Her reporting on the issue also won the 2020 American Society of Journalists and Author’s Crisis Coverage Award: COVID-19 Edition in the education category. Her profile of the first Latina head of America’s largest union of registered nurses helped raise awareness of the administration’s failure to secure personal protective equipment for hospital nurses.
Rikha’s reporting for The Fuller Project from the US-Mexico border in the fall of 2017 about the devastating toll of family separation, provided some of the earliest first-hand accounts from parents whose children had been taken by U.S. immigration authorities.
Prior to joining The Fuller Project, Rikha profiled five formerly incarcerated people who were casting their ballots in the 2016 presidential election for the first time, in Politico Magazine. Rikha has been published in The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, The Montgomery Advertiser, The Cap Times, and the Columbia Journalism Review.
From 2014 to 2017, Rikha was Intelligence Director at the Solutions Journalism Network. She has worked extensively in the global health space, including as part of a team in New Delhi, India that negotiated drug prices for the treatment of HIV/AIDS in low-income settings.
Rikha hails from Toronto, Canada and holds a Master’s degree from Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs, where she studied economic and political development. She is a former editor-in-chief of the Journal of International Affairs. Rikha is now based in Oakland, California.
Recent reporting by Rikha:
This Nurse is Leading the Fight for Safer Hospitals – The New York Times
Imagine Online School in a Language You Don’t Understand – The New York Times
Samantha Santhanam
Digital Marketing Associate
Samantha Santhanam is a Digital Marketing Associate with The Fuller Project, where she works on developing and executing web, social, and digital marketing strategies. She specializes in digital advertising, data analytics, and SEO. Sam works closely with the CCO in strategic efforts to increase the impact and reach of The Fuller Project.
Sam is an experienced professional who started her digital marketing career with a media start-up, working with clients from a broad set of industries encompassing higher education, technology, healthcare, and hospitality.
Prior to joining The Fuller Project, Sam worked as a Digital Marketing Manager at World Learning, a non-profit focused on education and international development. There, she developed strategies and executed campaigns that bolstered the company’s digital and online presence, increasing enrollment, and providing data-driven solutions.
Sam has a Bachelor’s degree in Science from India and received her Master’s degree in Digital Media Technology from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. When not working, Sam loves to tackle DIY projects at home or attempts to learn a new language.
Shola Lawal
Contributing Reporter
Shola Lawal is a Lagos-based journalist covering gender, conflict and the environment in West Africa. Her work has been published in publications such as the Mail & Guardian and TIME. Lawal was the 2019 IWMF Elizabeth Neuffer Fellow and completed stays at MIT, the Boston Globe and the New York Times during the program. Lawal has a masters degree in communication from the University of Lagos.
Tanvi Misra
Contributing Reporter
Tanvi Misra is an award-winning writer and multimedia journalist based in Washington, D.C. covering immigration policy, spatial marginalization, economic inequality, and criminal justice. Apart from The Fuller Project, her writing and radio pieces have appeared in The Atlantic, CQ Roll Call, The Guardian, Teen Vogue, NPR, and The BBC. Her work ranges from exclusive reportage, investigative data dives, award-winning features, and in-depth policy analyses, to essays and cultural critique, and has been cited in news articles, books, lawsuits, Congressional documents, and research papers. Tanvi is an immigrant from India and has reported in India, France, the U.K., and Germany, in addition to the United States.
Tiffany Arnold
Senior Social Media Producer
Tiffany Arnold is an award-winning multiplatform journalist who joins The Fuller Project as a senior social media producer, helping shape the way people consume, share and engage with the stories of women around the globe.
She arrives at Fuller from Washington, D.C.-based WTOP News, where she earned multiple regional Murrow Awards as a social media and engagement specialist. Tiffany also was a Books Marketing Fellow for Shout Mouse Press, a nonprofit indie book publisher that produces works for, by, and about youths from historically underrepresented communities.
Tiffany earned a master’s degree in publishing from The George Washington University and has an undergraduate degree in journalism from University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign.
Her career began with an internship at The News Journal in Delaware, as Chips Quinn Scholar. She has worked as a reporter and editor at newspapers and digital media startups throughout the D.C. region, leading to a prestigious Multimedia Editing Fellowship from the Maynard Institute and multiple awards from the Maryland-Delaware-D.C. Press Association for her digital projects.
In her spare time, Tiffany enjoys reading, sewing dresses, dancing, and eating other people’s food.
Valeria Popolizio
Business and Development Fellow
Valeria Popolizio is a Business and Development Fellow with The Fuller Project, where she conducts research and analysis for the organization’s strategy, development, operations, and HR functions and boosts the impact of our reporting.
Valeria graduated from the University of Connecticut where she received her bachelor’s degree in Political Science and Human Rights with a minor in Latinx Studies.
She is a part of the university’s inaugural BOLD Women’s Leadership Network cohort. As a scholar, she conducted a needs-assessment in her hometown to better understand how Latinx students were supported during the college application process.
Valeria has worked as a coordinator at the Puerto Rican Latin American Cultural Center for the last three years. With the help of her co-coordinator, she led one of the largest peer-mentoring programs on campus. Additionally, in 2018, her proposal for the University of Connecticut to host the New England Latinx Student Leadership Conference was accepted. As Conference Coordinator, Valeria led the planning committee and headed fundraising efforts.
She has also interned with Media Voices for Children, a non-profit organization that focuses on advocating for child rights. She has written for their quarterly magazines and is currently working on developing a national high school curriculum about child labor and child rights.
She enjoys working closely with her community to create equitable and empowering spaces – especially in education. Next fall she will attend Georgetown University, where she will start her master’s degree in Educational Transformation, with a concentration in Advocacy and Policy.
Board of Directors
Ana Reyes
Secretary, Board Member
Ana Reyes is a partner at William & Connelly LLP. She Co-Chairs the firm’s International Disputes practice group and is a member of its Executive Committee. She focuses her practice on complex litigation and international arbitration, representing clients throughout the world.
In 2017, Ana was named as the D.C. Women’s Bar Association’s Woman Lawyer of the Year in recognition of her international litigation practice and for her efforts in representing the rights of those seeking asylum in the United States. She has devoted a substantial portion of her practice to pro bono work, representing refugee organizations and refugees seeking asylum in the United States. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees has retained Ana for representation in numerous appellate matters and commissioned her to draft a comprehensive report on asylum law in the United States.
Ana is a Clinical Visiting Lecturer at Yale Law School, where she co-teaches Advocacy in International Arbitration. Ana was born in Montevideo, Uruguay, and grew up in Louisville, Kentucky. She received her J.D. from Harvard Law School in 2000. In 2014, Ana also received a Master’s in International Public Policy from the Johns Hopkins University, School of Advanced International Studies.
Gina Maya
Board Member
Gina Maya joined Human Rights Watch in January 2016 as the director of the newly opened Silicon Valley office. Since the office has opened, Gina has helped to significantly increase the engagement of the local community and has overseen the growth of the office into one of the largest fundraising centers for Human Rights Watch. She was previously a member of the Executive Committee of HRW’s California North Committee and traveled to Burma and the Democratic Republic of Congo with Human Rights Watch. She attended Indiana University and Columbia Law School. After graduating law school, Gina worked at the law firm of Simpson Thacher & Bartlett and then at JP Morgan Securities, Inc. Prior to joining Human Rights Watch, Gina took a pause in her career to raise three children but continued to be actively involved in various organizations and local boards in the community.
Jodi Rudoren
Board Member
Jodi Rudoren became Editor-in-Chief of The Forward, the nation’s oldest independent Jewish news organization, in September 2019 after more than two decades as a reporter and editor at The New York Times. She is helping lead a transformation of the storied 123-year-old institution, a nonprofit that went digital-only in early 2019.
A longtime newsroom innovator and collaborative leader, Jodi was an author of the 2020 report on newsroom structure and vision.
As Jerusalem bureau chief from 2012 to 2016, Ms. Rudoren covered two wars between Israel and the Gaza Strip, two Israeli elections, innumerable terror attacks and Secretary of State John Kerry’s failed nine-month peace talks. She also wrote extensively about the Iran deal, struggles over Israeli identity and the collapse of Palestinian politics.
Ms. Rudoren was previously bureau chief in Chicago and national education correspondent, as well as Education editor, deputy International editor and deputy Metropolitan editor. She covered the 2004 presidential campaign, created the print Sunday Metropolitan section, and was executive producer of the multimedia series ““One in 8 Million” which won NYTimes.com’s first Emmy Award, for “new approaches to documentary,” in 2009.
A 1992 graduate of Yale University, the former Jodi Wilgoren and her husband, the former Gary Ruderman, combined their surnames in 2006. They live in Montclair, N.J., with their twins, who were born in 2007.
Mary G. Berner
Board Member
Mary G. Berner, President and Chief Executive Officer of Cumulus Media Inc., the country’s second largest radio company, has led some of the world’s top media organizations and brands, building and directing companies to deliver strong value, financial performance and growth. Before joining Cumulus, Berner serves as President and CEO of MPA– The Association of Magazine Media. Previously, Berner was Chief Executive Officer of media giant Reader’s Digest Association and formerly led Fairchild Publications, Inc., first as President and CEO, then as President and as an Officer of Condé Nast. Among her many distinctions, in 2016, Berner was named one of the most powerful women in entertainment by The Hollywood Reporter, the only radio executive to be selected for that annual list.
Miriam Mahlow
Board Member
As a Managing Director in the Development and Outreach Department at Human Rights Watch, Ms. Mahlow works with supporters in Europe and North America. She served as founding director of Human Rights Watch’s Germany Committee and helped to establish HRW offices in five countries. Formerly working from Istanbul, she is in charge of Human Rights Watch’s Development presence in North America, Germany and The Netherlands. Formerly, Miriam worked as a journalist in Africa; a press officer for the United Nations, in Dili, East Timor; and an external staff member for the World Economic Forum. Miriam was born and raised in Berlin, Germany.
Rebecca Winthrop
Board Member
Dr. Winthrop is a senior fellow and director of the Center for Universal Education. Her research focuses on education in the developing world, with special attention to the skills children need to succeed in life, and improving quality learning for the most marginalized children and youth, including girls and children affected by extreme violence. Prior to joining Brookings in June 2009, Dr. Winthrop spent 15 years working in the field of education for displaced and migrant communities, most recently as the head of education for the International Rescue Committee. She is the co-author of What Works in Girls’ Education: Evidence for the World’s Best Investment.
Ritu Sharma
Treasurer, Board Member
Ms. Sharma is the co-founder and former president of Women Thrive Worldwide, a leading advocacy organization bringing the voices of women and girls to Washington’s highest-level decision makers. Ritu’s advocacy was instrumental in the creation of the White House Strategy to Prevent and Respond to Gender-Based Violence Globally. Women Thrive was the driving force behind the US Agency International Development’s establishment of the Gender Equality and Female Empowerment Policy. Ritu now trains groups around the world in advocacy and is a Senior Visiting Fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. She is author of Teach a Woman to Fish: Overcoming Poverty Around the Globe.
Robert “Rosey” Rosenthal
Board Member
Robert J. Rosenthal is a board member and an executive producer at The Center for Investigative Reporting. An award-winning journalist, Rosenthal has worked for some of the most respected newspapers in the country, including The New York Times, Boston Globe, Philadelphia Inquirer and the San Francisco Chronicle.
Rosenthal worked for 22 years at the Inquirer, starting as a reporter and eventually becoming its executive editor in 1998. He became managing editor of the San Francisco Chronicle in late 2002, and joined CIR as executive director in 2008. Before joining the Inquirer in 1979, Rosenthal worked as a reporter for six years at The Boston Globe and three-and-a-half years at The New York Times, where he was a news assistant on the foreign desk and an editorial assistant on the Pulitzer Prize-winning Pentagon Papers project.
As a reporter, Rosenthal won numerous awards, including the Overseas Press Club Award for magazine writing, the Sigma Delta Chi Award for distinguished foreign correspondence, and the National Association of Black Journalists Award for Third World Reporting. He was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in international reporting. Rosenthal was a Pulitzer Prize judge four times. He has been an adjunct professor at Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and the University of California at Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism.
Sarah O’Hagan
Chair, Board of Directors
Sarah is a former journalist and a long-time strategic advisor in the fields of refugee and women’s rights. Sarah is a trustee of Johns Hopkins University; and former Chair of the Board of Advisors of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (JHU-SAIS), where she and others built SAIS Women Lead. As co-Chair of the International Rescue Committee (IRC) from 2010-2016, Sarah has traveled frequently to visit programs. She also serves on the board of the Louis and Nancy Hatch Dupree Foundation for the Afghanistan Center at Kabul University, and on the Board of Directors of America Media, the leading provider of editorial content for thinking Catholics.
Recent reporting by Sarah:
Why Trump’s Immigration Policy Will Hurt All Americans, The New Republic
How Immigration Reporting Overlooks Women, Columbia Journalism Review