John Sullivan

Senior Editor

John Sullivan is a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and Associate Investigations Editor on The Washington Post’s Investigations Team. As senior editor at the Investigative Reporting Workshop, Sullivan pairs students with various investigative teams inside the Post, where they contribute to award-winning projects as researchers and reporters. Eight students under his direction were part of a Post team that earned the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for coverage of the January 6 insurrection, tracking the attackers, their affiliations and the criminal charges against them.

Sullivan previously was a senior lecturer and assistant director of Medill Watchdog and member of the journalism faculty at Northwestern University. He spent nearly a decade at The Philadelphia Inquirer covering the war in Iraq, state government, city hall, science and health and as a member of the paper’s investigative team. Sullivan led a team of five reporters who examined violence in the Philadelphia schools. The series won the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service in 2012, a Casey Medal and the IRE Award.

Sullivan is an investigative reporter-in-residence at American University and teaches an investigative practicum at the graduate level.