Mark Olalde and Ryan Olalde

Mark Olalde reported for The Center for Public Integrity as an American University Fellow. He spent several years as a freelance journalist, most recently reporting on the underfunding of coal mine cleanup across the U.S. on a McGraw Fellowship for Business Journalism. He previous investigated South Africa’s failed mine closure system, which earned him recognition as the 2017 SAB Environmental Media Awards print journalist of the year and placement on the Global Editors Network Data Journalism Awards shortlist. He has also worked for The Arizona Republic and the Medill Justice Project, and he holds an undergraduate journalism degree from Northwestern University. Ryan Menezes joined the Los Angeles Times in 2013. He primarily conducts analyses for reporting projects as a hand with the Data Desk while writing about a multitude of topics. Occasionally, he will post scripts written in R or Python to GitHub. Menezes studied statistics at UCLA, where he also wrote editorials and covered various sports for the student newspaper in between games of pick-up basketball.