Vanessa Romo
Vanessa Romo is a reporter for NPR's News Desk. She covers breaking news on a wide range of topics, weighing in daily on everything from immigration and the treatment of migrant children, to a war-crimes trial where a witness claimed he was the actual killer, to an alleged sex cult. She has also covered the occasional cat-clinging-to-the-hood-of-a-car story.
Before her stint on the News Desk, Romo spent the early months of the Trump Administration on the Washington Desk covering stories about culture and politics – the voting habits of the post-millennial generation, the rise of Maxine Waters as a septuagenarian pop culture icon and DACA quinceañeras as Trump protests.
In 2016, she was at the core of the team that launched and produced The New York Times' first political podcast, The Run-Up with Michael Barbaro. Prior to that, Romo was a Spencer Education Fellow at Columbia University's School of Journalism where she began working on a radio documentary about a pilot program in Los Angeles teaching black and Latino students to code switch.
Romo has also traveled extensively through the Member station world in California and Washington. As the education reporter at Southern California Public Radio, she covered the region's K-12 school districts and higher education institutions and won the Education Writers Association first place award as well as a Regional Edward R. Murrow for Hard News Reporting.
Before that, she covered business and labor for Member station KNKX, keeping an eye on global companies including Amazon, Boeing, Starbucks and Microsoft.
A Los Angeles native, she is a graduate of Loyola Marymount University, where she received a degree in history. She also earned a master's degree in Journalism from NYU. She loves all things camaron-based.
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The $10 billion telescope is nearly ready to begin capturing images that scientists hope will help uncover the mysteries of the universe — and scope out other possible habitable planets. -
Kai Forsyth relished being the only passenger on a flight from London to Orlando. But his solo trip highlights the wastefulness of near-empty flights that environmentalists are trying to ban. -
The project, a first of its kind, aims to study the social and cultural dimensions of living in space and how people adapt their behavior when they're living in a completely new environment. -
The three officers, who fired their weapons at a car amid crowds of people, face manslaughter charges in the killing of Fanta Bility. -
Burnout and thinning substitute teacher rolls plus the fallout of the omicron surge is pushing school leaders to the brink of desperation. Lawmakers are responding by rewriting hiring rules. -
Lawrence Brooks served in the U.S. Army when the military was still racially segregated. But the Black soldier's deployment to Australia offered a reprieve from the racism of Jim Crow laws at home. -
The project is limited to Oregon users and follows a lawsuit settlement alleging that hosts could discriminate against Black renters based on their names. -
Jackknifed tractor-trailers blocked traffic in both directions along the vital corridor south of the nation's capital. Some people waited 16 hours or more for rescue. -
Airlines have canceled thousands of flights since Christmas weekend, leaving travelers scrambling to figure out how to book new seats and get reimbursements for added expenses. -
The move follows an unprecedented spike in positivity rates in the Capitol and mirrors record-high infection rates throughout Washington D.C., driven by the highly contagious omicron variant.
