Aleszu Bajak

Writing        Code and Design        Speaking Engagements        Teaching        Fellowships & Awards        Publications        Bio and Contact

Aleszu Bajak is the director of data visualization at the Urban Institute where he provides vision, strategy and standards for data products and leads a team of developers who use a robust design process to translate Urban’s research and data into visual narratives for audiences from Capitol Hill to city council.

In 2022, he was hired to set a new vision for data visualization at the organization and build a team, and a scalable toolset, from scratch. In the role, he facilitates strategic conversations across multiple teams to launch major data products like the Upward Mobility Data Dashboard, involving delicate coordination between data science, research, and web development teams as well as external stakeholders and vendors.

Previously, he was a senior data reporter on USA TODAY's data team, part of the newspaper's national investigative unit, where he published short- and long-term investigative and data-driven projects using traditional reporting and a suite of data science techniques including regression, geospatial analysis, proportional hazards modeling and natural language processing.

He is a former Knight Science Journalism Fellow at M.I.T., was a founding senior writer at Undark magazine and founding editor of Esquire Classic, a project resuscitating the magazine's archives. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, M.I.T. Technology Review and Nature.

Full bio here.

For USA TODAY, I used hierarchical clustering to examine over 2.8 million tweets posted by members of Congress since 2010, showing Republicans and Democrats increasingly segregating into distinct rhetorical bubbles. With graphics journalist Ramon Padilla, we built an immersive presentation that leveraged animation, annotations and news events to illustrate the phenomenon. Code here. This project won a 2022 Innovative Storytelling Award from the National Press Foundation. Speech here.

My analysis of Parler on Jan. 6 found calls for civil war intensified on the right-leaning social media app as Donald Trump urged his followers to march on the Capitol. The article, When Trump started his speech before the Capitol riot, talk on Parler turned to civil war, was cited in Trump's second impeachment trial by Congresswoman Diana DeGette.

Network analysis

When Derek Chauvin was found guilty for the murder of George Floyd, the verdict spread quickly on social media. We analyzed the volume and rhetoric of social media reactions to the conviction based on a panel of 250 influential accounts on the left and right. Read more at: "The words Americans used after Chauvin verdict reveal our political divide."

On May 14, 2020, Jeff Howe and I published "A Study Said Covid Wasn’t That Deadly. The Right Seized It." in The New York Times, which was based on our analysis of how ~900 preprint studies were shared on Twitter. I worked with the Times's Stuart Thompson and Yaryna Serkez to develop a timeline bubble plot and two network visualizations.

For a year-long investigation into broken adoptions, I used Cox proportional hazards regression and survival analysis to identify risk factors among adoptees – such as children's race, age and mental health status – that were linked to statistically significant higher odds of returning to foster care. Full code here. This project won an Award of Excellence from the Society for News Design in 2023.

To explore the weaponization of "critical race theory" for USA TODAY, I analyzed and visualized the phrase's evolution from conservative think tanks and blogs through right-wing media and into the mainstream.

I built an interactive app and published a report with researchers at Northeastern University's Lazer Lab to explore the top links, domains and keywords extracted from 29 million tweets related to Covid-19 shared between January 1st and September 30th, 2020 by over half a million Americans for whom we had demographic information such as age, state of residence and political party registration.

Ahead of the 2020 decennial census, I wrote, designed and managed an ambitious project for Journalist’s Resource at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center that produced a set of downloadable and customizable national, state, regional and program-specific datasets and embeddable data visualizations on census-derived federally funded programs built for newsrooms across the country. Shoutouts to Tyler Machado, John Wihbey and Carmen Nobel for guidance and bottomless patience.

For Peruvian investigative news outlet OjoPúblico, I collected, geocoded and designed a map of Covid-19 clinical trials with Martin Frigaard.

With the Dakota Access Pipeline protests in North Dakota in full swing, I decided to highlight the actual risk of the pipeline rupturing together with just how pockmarked America's recent track record of spills is. The result, pubished in Undark, was an interactive map based on statistical analysis of federal data - complemented by several in-depth interviews and case studies - of the crude oil pipeline spills America has witnessed in the last decade. Methodology here.

Oil and Water: The Dakota Access Pipeline

For Undark magazine, I built an interactive map showing two decades of deforestation in Nicaragua.

For Undark, I built a series of maps highlighting the American South's vulnerability to the novel coronavirus pandemic.

To better communicate the risk Covid-19 poses in children, USA TODAY's Janie Haseman and I analyzed trends in pediatric flu and COVID hospitalizations, publishing How COVID-19 in kids compares to the flu, other viruses in children along with several graphics.

As the Covid-19 vaccine rolled out, I worked with Janet Loehrke to illustrate the complex network of state and federal systems that data on patients and vaccine shipments flowed through.

For Medium's GEN magazine, I wrote about and visualized Twitter attacks on Joe Biden and Elizabeth Warren using data from natural language processing startup MarvelousAI.

My analysis of gender and bias in media coverage of the 2020 Democratic candidates, a collaboration with Northeastern student Alex Frandsen, was picked up by CNN, The New York Times, The Washington Post and more.



Negativity on the campaign trail

With Floris Wu, I published a story at Roll Call exploring the sentiment of politicians on Twitter in the lead-up to the 2018 midterms.

I've used Principal Component Analysis and other NLP techniques in my research at Northeastern's School of Journalism.

For Esquire, I compared the value generated by Martin Scorcese's use of two different actors.

Writing

Broken adoptions, buried records: How states are failing adoptees

Far from the fairy tale: Broken adoptions shatter promises to 66,000 kids in the US

How many adoptions fail and why? Here’s what the numbers tell us.

A national system to prioritize COVID-19 vaccines has largely failed as states rely on their own systems

When Trump started his speech before the Capitol riot, talk on Parler turned to civil war

How the antifa conspiracy theory traveled from the fringe to the floor of Congress

'Hope' is out, 'fight' is in: Does tweeting divide Congress, or simply echo its divisions?

Another Marjorie Taylor Greene or AOC? We found Congress' next potential lightning rods.

Red Words, Blue Words: Democracy vs. witch hunt: What congressional campaigns are posting about Jan. 6 hearings, by party

The words Americans used after Chauvin verdict reveal our political divide

How critical race theory went from conservative battle cry to mainstream powder keg

Could we save lives by assigning each American a place in line for vaccines?

Michigan bet big on mass vaccine events for COVID-19. It didn’t work out as hoped.

Did America’s schools open safely? We crunched the latest data on COVID-19 and kids.

How COVID-19 in kids compares to the flu, other viruses in children

COVID and kids: How the omicron surge is impacting child hospitalizations, school safety

‘We’re Apollo 13-ing this vaccine rollout’: Despite years of budget cuts, minuscule staff and constantly escalating demands, health officials pulled off the COVID-19 vaccine rollout.

'Just not equal at all': Vaccine rollout in Chicago a microcosm of racial disparities nationwide

Her Brain Tormented Her, and Doctors Could Not Understand Why

Someone Is Tracking How Much You Vape on Twitter

What Does Twitter Say About Your Diet?

What should Peru do to improve its science?

Science in Colombia on the cusp of change

Chile’s chance to embrace science for the twenty-first century

Chile’s Scientists Take to the Streets

Argentina: The RNA Sleuths

U.S. Assesses Virus of the Caribbean

Key Galapagos Research Station in Trouble

Microbe new to science found in self-fermented beer

Colombian coffee science

Lectures aren’t just boring, they’re ineffective, too

Abundant natural gas may do little to reduce U.S. emissions

Tratar el Covid-19: separar el entusiasmo de la evidencia. Read it in English here.

Why Trump's talking points become ours. Like it or not.

For Bordeaux’s Winemakers, Rising Temperatures Bring a Reckoning. Republished at The Atlantic as Global Warming Could Throw France’s Wine-Making Traditions Into Chaos.

Climate Data for the Masses

Rebuilding Louisiana’s Disappearing Delta

To Feed Energy Demand, There Will Be Sprawl

For the Obama Administration, the Clean Coal Dream Lives On

Rushing Climate Science

In Police Body Camera Footage, Tech Companies See a Niche

Breaking Down "Broken Windows"

Can Donald Trump Dismantle the EPA? It’s Been Tried Before

Mobilizing Green Latinos

Hillary Clinton and the Cultural Biases of Being ‘Presidential’

Micro-targeting and the 2016 Election

Growing West Virginia’s solar sector?

Changing Latin America's Culture of Insular Science

Playing Politics With Zika — and the Public’s Health

The Blind Pursuit of Mosquito Control

For the U.S., a More Worrisome Zika Vector?

For Venezuela's Zika Woes, Some Tylenol

While Congress Dithered, the Zika Virus Flourished in Puerto Rico

Map: The Persistent Scourge of Lead Paint

Podcast: Rebuilding Louisiana’s disappearing delta. Plus, the accompanying article.

Browse all my stories for Undark here.

Will Embryonic Stem Cells Ever Cure Anything?

Biden and Warren Were the Top Post-Debate Targets on Twitter

The landscape architect turned steward of Colombia's endangered monkey

How to use hierarchical cluster analysis on time series data

How Quartz is bringing storytelling and interactive design to sponsored content

Revolutionizing the work of newsrooms by making citizen videos searchable

How to learn responsive web design by coding your own news article

How to organize your data for various charts and graphs

The Dangerous Belief That Extreme Technology Will Fix Climate Change

Craft Beer Brewers Feel Effects Of Climate Change

Boxing in Cuba (book review)

Phil Caputo: What I've Learned

Don Zimmer’s hard head

Frank Sinatra Turns 100

Quiz: Which Tech Titan said it?

Dataviz: Happy Birthday, Martin Scorsese!

Catching fog in Lima

Video: Dean Kamen and the FIRST robotics competition

Video: Counting horseshoe crabs on Long Island

Video: Tending crops on a Brooklyn rooftop

Catcher in the fog

Fossil fuels get a lot more global subsidies than public health does

Failures of Brazil's universal health care plan offer lessons for the US

The world is awash in pesticides. Does it have to be?

In Water We Trust

What if a hurricane like Sandy hit your brewery?

Should You Be Worried About the BPA in Your Beer Can?

Sequencing Wild Yeast

Unlocking the Science of Hop Aromas

The Lager Yeast Genome Project

Brewing in Thin Air

The Illegal Beer Business

Stemming the Rise of Barley Diseases: How Nasty Fungal Infections Could Affect Our Grains and Beer

Safeguarding biodiversity in tourism hotspots

Represas hidroeléctricas propician extinción de especies

Prevenir pandemias es más barato que combatirlas

Intervención de la comunidad ayuda a prevenir el Chagas

Darwin, Neruda and Me

The future of Latin American science

The dengue detectives

A year later, the effects of a volcanic eruption still plague Patagonia

A farm runs on homemade biodiesel in Argentina

How can we fight the rise of deadly superbugs?

Back in Colombia – and on the Gringo Trail

Colombian coffee at the crossroads

Latinoamérica genial

Can the world’s growing appetite for unique coffee save Brazil’s specialty coffee farms?

São Paulo razes crack cocaine shantytown

Speaking engagements, workshops

Teaching

Fellowships & Awards

Publications

Full Bio

Aleszu Bajak is the director of data visualization at the Urban Institute where he provides vision, strategy and standards for data products and leads a team of developers who use a robust design process to translate Urban’s research and data into visual narratives for audiences from Capitol Hill to city council. In 2022, he was hired to set a new vision for data visualization at the organization and build a team, and a scalable toolset, from scratch. In the role, he facilitates strategic conversations across multiple teams to launch major data products like the Upward Mobility Data Dashboard, involving delicate coordination between data science, research, and web development teams as well as external stakeholders and vendors.

At Urban, he has set a strategy for building more reproducible and cost-efficient products using the Javascript framework Svelte (see component library here) and workflows in R and R Shiny that appreciate social science research technology stacks. He has overseen the conceptualization, design and execution of dozens of data tools and dashboards including "America Has a Housing Shortage. Zoning Changes Near Transit Could Help.," "Getting a Good Job Depends More on Race and Gender than Education" and "How School Officials and Housing Developers Can Partner to Desegregate Communities."

Previously, he was a senior data reporter on USA TODAY's data team, part of the newspaper's national investigative unit, where he published short- and long-term investigative and data-driven projects using traditional reporting and a suite of data science techniques including regression, geospatial analysis, proportional hazards modeling and natural language processing.

Before USA TODAY, he spent several years teaching and managing the graduate programs at Northeastern University's School of Journalism where he launched Storybench.org, an under the hood guide to digital and data storytelling and was innovation lead for the Co-Laboratory for Data Impact. He's also the founder of LatinAmericanScience.org, a resource for science news and opinion out of Latin America, which he started in 2012 in Argentina.

In 2013, Aleszu was awarded a Knight Science Journalism Fellowship at M.I.T. where he explored the interface between journalists, designers and developers between visits to the Muddy Charles. Since then, he has taught journalism courses and led workshops at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard, Brandeis University, Harvard Extension School, Boston University's Storytelling with Data bootcamp, and O'Reilly Media. He has spoken at conferences in Seoul, Toulouse, San Antonio, Bogotá and Querétaro.

He has been a freelance reporter in Latin America, a producer for the public radio show Science Friday, and once upon a time worked in the gene therapy department at Weill Cornell. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe Magazine, M.I.T. Technology Review, OjoPúblico, The Huffington Post, Esquire, Nature, Science, and Guernica, among other outlets. He grew up in New Jersey, Germany and Colombia and has lived in Chile, Peru and Argentina. He can be reached at firstname lastname at gmail.com.