Work
College athletes can now make millions off sponsorship deals. Here’s the first look at California’s numbers
CalMatters | March 2025
data | Svelte
Working with Adam Echelman, I compiled public records on name, image and likeness compensation at California public Division 1 schools. The data required extensive cleaning and standardization. We released the data for download to help facilitate further reporting, especially by student journalists for their schools.
Voter guide quizzes
CalMatters | Nov 2024
design & front-end development | Svelte
Researched, wrote, developed and illustrated interactive quizzes to help Californians see where they stand on various propositions in an engaging format.
Vast stretches of California lose maternity care as dozens of hospitals shut labor wards
CalMatters | Oct 2023
data, design & front-end development | R, Svelte
Working with health reporters Kristen Hwang and Ana B. Ibarra, I created an original methodology by combing through hospital financial records to figure out that at least 46 California hospitals had closed maternity wards since 2012. This tally had not been published before, to our knowledge. o Our series on maternity ward closures led to a new state law meant to give communities more time to plan for closures.
Who buys electric cars in California — and who doesn’t?
CalMatters | Mar 2023
data, design & front-end development | R, Mapbox GL JS, Svelte
No statewide data exists to break down the race or other demographic characteristics of California’s car buyers...so I made my own methodology using publicly available data. I compared the ZIP codes of electric car registrations with Census information on the race, income and education of people living in each. And we made the clean data available for download!.
Inmate shuffle: How California bounces around its mentally ill prisoners
CalMatters | Jun 2022
front-end development | JavaScript
I designed and developed the story presentation, using animated graphics to highlight how a mentally ill prison inmate was transferred around the state 39 times in four years.
Danger in Droughtsville: California’s urban water at risk
CalMatters | Dec 2021
research & reporting
Sometimes I write! This was a fun and scary deep dive into the myriad risks facing urban water in California.
Bay Area Fog Tracker
San Francisco Chronicle | Aug 2019
data analysis & back-end development | Python
The Chronicle dev team has put out several trackers the last few years, including wildfires and car break-ins. Near the end of my internship, I was asked to implement a “lighter,” more “whimsical” tracker for one of San Francisco’s most famous phenomenons: fog. I appreciated my supervisors wanting me to have a project I could completely own. Due to a variety of reasons (time constraints, other projects I pitched in on, my limited skills) I was unable to complete the project during my internship. However, my supervisor Evan Wagstaff was able to finish the front-end and turned the project live soon after, for which I am very grateful.
After consulting a meteorology PhD student who posted some tutorials on GitHub and lots of experimenting in Jupyter Notebooks, I wrote a Python script that retrieves data from the NOAA’s GOES-17 satellite, which are publicly available on Amazon Web Services, and converts them to images. The script initially crashed the Chronicle’s virtual computer, but eventually Evan and I managed to reduce the computing power it needed.
On the design side, I originally riffed off our previous tracker template. But when one of the designers saw that idea, he reimagined it in a much more visually interesting way that I never would’ve thought of on my own. The final presentation ended up being quite close to his mockup. From this experience, I learned that I wanted to get better at thinking at design and how to approach projects before even starting to code. That’s why I signed up for an introductory design course the following semester.
Overall, this project taught me that projects don’t always turn out the way you envision them at the beginning. There were even points at which I thought it wasn’t even possible because I couldn’t figure out the back-end data retrieval. But I am so grateful that the team at the Chronicle supported me and carried it through. Now I have a fun project I'm really proud of.
Bay Area homelessness: answers to your questions
San Francisco Chronicle | Jul 2019
design & front-end development | React, Gatsby ArchieML, Figma
This piece was part of the annual SF Homeless Project in which Bay Aera newsrooms, led by the Chronicle, focus coverage on the region's homelessness crisis. After I expressed interest in gaining more experience creating mockups, my supervisor asked me to design this Q&A project.
My goal was to make it clear that the Chronicle had thoroughly answered all the questions from readers, as well as make the page easy to navigate. After my design (using Figma) was approved, I coded the page using React.js and ArchieML to convert the text content from Google Docs to JSON.
Since I led the design and development of this project, I learned a lot about iteratively improving based on feedback. I was also pleasantly surprised at how much time our audience spent reading this text-based project, with a significant portion even scrolling all the way to the bottom of the page.