Charles Lewis is a distinguished journalist in residence and the founding executive editor of the new Investigative Reporting Workshop at the American University School of Communication, in Washington, D.C.

A national investigative journalist for nearly 30 years, Lewis is a bestselling author who has founded or co-founded four nonprofit enterprises in Washington, including the Center for Public Integrity. He left a successful career as an investigative producer for ABC News and the CBS News program 60 Minutes and began the Center, which under his leadership published roughly 300 investigative reports, including 14 books, from 1989 through 2004, honored more than 30 times by national journalism organizations. He began the Center’s International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, the world’s first working network of premier reporters producing content across borders, in late 1997.

In 2008, he created, directed and co-authored Iraq: The War Card, a 380,000-word chronology and analysis of the pre-war rhetoric made by leading members of the Bush administration. In 2003, in February the Center posted secret draft “Patriot II” legislation and in October posted all of the known U.S. contracts in Iraq and Afghanistan. Windfalls of War first identified that Halliburton had received the most money from those contracts, and won the first George Polk Award for Internet Reporting. A co-author of five books, including national bestseller The Buying of the President 2004, Lewis was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 1998 and received the PEN USA First Amendment award in 2004.

Since 2005, Lewis co-founded Global Integrity, which tracks governance and corruption trends around the world, and he has served as founding president of the Fund for Independence in Journalism in Washington, an endowment and legal defense support organization for the Center for Public Integrity. He was a Ferris Professor at Princeton University in 2005, and a Shorenstein Fellow at Harvard University in the spring of 2006.