About Us

Heather Chaplin is the founding director of Journalism + Design and the recipient of multiple media innovation grants from foundations including The Knight Foundation, The MacArthur Foundation and The Democracy Fund. Before joining The New School as an associate professor of journalism in 2014, Chaplin was a reporter, published in places such as The New York Times, The LA Times, GQ, Details and The Cut. She also covered videogames and digital culture for All Things Considered and was the co-author of Smartbomb: The Quest for Art, Entertainment and Big Bucks in the Videogame Revolution (Algonquin Books, 2006. )More recently, she was the author of Reckless Years: A Diary of Love and Madness, (Simon & Schuster, 2017.) She's been a fellow at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and she is a regular speaker on the topic of the future of journalism.

Irwin Chen is an assistant professor at Parsons The New School for Design, and is the design lead for the Journalism + Design Program. He received his BA in English Literature from Yale University in 1994, and spent one year in the Netherlands on a Fulbright studying design at the Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht. He returned to New York where he began work as a digital designer, first for Jessica Helfand and later for FEED Magazine and 2×4. He is the founder of Redub LLC, an information architecture and interaction design consultancy, and is also Visualization Designer for The Mintz Group.

Cole Goins is the managing director of the Journalism + Design Lab, leading a national initiative to equip more people to participate in their local media systems. As a media consultant and facilitator, he has led strategic planning, trainings and events for a variety of organizations including Cityside, the American Press Institute, Poynter, USA TODAY Network, Free Press, the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY, and the Investigative Reporting Workshop at American University. He spent a decade in nonprofit investigative journalism, first as the engagement editor at the Center for Public Integrity, and most recently as the director of community engagement at Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting. He earned a degree in journalism from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and currently lives in the Bay Area.

As network lead for the Journalism + Design lab, Megan Lucero (she/her) facilitates and grows collaborations with community colleges across the country. Megan started her career in newspapers and was the first Data Editor for The Times and Sunday Times (London). She then launched and ran The Bureau Local, an award-winning grassroots and community-led investigative network in the UK. Megan is now based in San Diego, CA, and supports organizations and projects around the world working at the intersection of systems change, community power and journalism, including News Futures, The People's Newsroom and others.

Valerie Popp is a program builder and public humanities expert with nearly a decade of experience in higher education and cultural philanthropy. In her role as Program + Sustainability Lead, she supports the Journalism + Design team in developing, funding, and managing cohort-based initiatives and events that amplify the amazing work of community colleges across the country. As the former Director of Strategic Initiatives at the New Jersey Council for the Humanities, she built and led new award programs including NJCH Sponsorships and a statewide community journalism portfolio known as Informed NJ. She also previously served as Senior Program Officer at the American Council of Learned Societies, where she was part of a team that awarded nearly $25 million in fellowships and grants to scholars annually. A proud first-generation college graduate, Valerie holds a B.A. in English literature from Yale University and a M.A. and Ph.D. in English literature from the University of California, Los Angeles.

As a Product Design + Engineering Lead with the Journalism + Design Lab, Andrew Rodriguez Calderón helps facilitate and support J+D grantees's initiatives to empower people to participate in their local news and information ecosystems. He also teaches in the engagement journalism specialization at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism. Previously, he worked as an award-winning computational journalist and project lead at The Marshall Project, a non-profit newsroom covering criminal justice in the United States. He is passionate about using collaborative design and community engagement to co-create civic infrastructure that re-envisions how people create, share and gather news and information that addresses the needs of historically disempowered communities.