Aleszu Bajak is director of data visualization at the Urban Institute. He provides vision, strategy, and standards for data visualization and leads a team of developers who translate Urban’s research and data into visual narratives for broad and diverse audiences.

Previously, Bajak was an investigative data reporter at USA TODAY, where he covered child welfare, public health, misinformation, and politics using data crawling, regression analysis, geographic information systems, natural language processing, and other data science techniques.

Bajak 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 served as innovation lead for the Co-Laboratory for Data Impact. He is a former Knight Science Journalism fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was a founding senior writer at Undark magazine, and a producer for the public radio show Science Friday. His work has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, MIT Technology Review, and Nature.

Bajak holds bachelor’s degrees in biology and Spanish from Amherst College and a graduate degree in analytics from Northeastern University.