Matt Kiefer
Assistant Professor at Northwestern University Medill School
Chicago, Illinois, United States
Summary
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Senior🎓
Top SchoolMatt Kiefer is an assistant professor and data journalist with 12 years of experience building tools and systems that acquire, process, and analyze complex public records to support investigative reporting and academic research. He has led and launched data journalism teams and projects at major newsrooms—including WBEZ, The Washington Post, and the Chicago Reporter—designing FOIA automation, newsroom databases, and interactive reporting tools that have supported award-winning investigations. Comfortable across Python, databases, and newsroom R&D, he has a track record of turning messy government data into reproducible workflows and newsworthy stories, from tracking court filings after Jan. 6 to exposing racial disparities in COVID-19 mortality. He complements newsroom leadership with hands-on prototyping—authoring open-source FOIAmail and building production scraping systems for election results—bridging journalism, software and pedagogy. Based in Chicago, he combines academic rigor with practical product instincts, training journalists to adopt data-driven methods while shipping robust tools used in real investigations.
13 years of coding experience
9 years of employment as a software developer
Associate of Arts, Associate of Arts at Oakton CollegeBachelor of Arts, English, Bachelor of Arts, English at Northeastern Illinois UniversityUniversity of Illinois Chicago
Github Skills (22)
appliance9
parse8
sqlite-database8
pandas-dataframe8
datasette7
automation7
python7
names7
cli6
pydata6
parsing6
dataframes6
github-app5
pandas5
polars4
Programming languages (4)
Github contributions (5)
thechicagoreporter/cop-matcher
Aug 2016 - Aug 2019
Helps identify police officers named in lawsuits
Contributions:7 commits, 1 PR, 7 pushes in 3 years 1 month
policepolice-officersidentify
bettergov/foiamail
Apr 2017 - Mar 2021
yet another foia automation service
Contributions:74 commits, 2 PRs, 71 pushes in 4 years
automation
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