Washington Post hires FT’s Gilbert as a data reporter

The following was sent out from The Washington Post’s director of the data reporting team Meghan Hoyer and Well+Being editor Tara Parker-Pope:

We’re excited to welcome Caitlin Gilbert to The Post, where she will be a data reporter embedded on the Well+Being team.

Caitlin has worked for the past year and a half as a U.S.-based data journalist at the Financial Times, covering a variety of topics, including the economy, politics and how Broadway fared during the coronavirus lockdowns. She also covered the opioid overdose crisis, the pandemic and abortion access in the country. She earlier worked as a visual journalist at Reuters. In 2021, she received her PhD in neuroscience and genomics from Rockefeller University, where she studied the genomic signatures of the songbird brain to look at how speech and language skills are acquired.

She has a long history of using journalism to explain scientific concepts, dating to her days as an undergraduate at Georgetown University, where she wrote a biweekly explanatory column in the student paper looking at pop culture issues through the lens of neuroscience. She received her undergraduate degree in neurobiology.

Caitlin, who is currently based in Brooklyn, will be working remotely with regular stops in the newsroom until she relocates to D.C. later this year. She starts Jan. 30.