For almost a decade, Sara Simon ’13 built a career as a data journalist, with positions at the New York Times, Vermont Public Radio, and Spotlight PA, an investigate newsroom covering Pennsylvania. But this fall, she began a Ph.D. in history at Northwestern University.

Sara became interested in the subject of her current research—death data—while on assignment for Spotlight PA. At a meeting of the Pennsylvania State Board of Funeral Directors in 2019, she witnessed a kerfuffle caused by the state’s transition from paper to digital records. “They were still using typewriters to produce death certificates,” she recalls. “That was interesting to me as someone who knows about technology and the process of collecting data.”

Her work as a historian is not that far from what she did as a journalist: making sense of vast, complex data. As a journalist, she worked on dashboards that tracked dynamic events like election results and COVID-19 outbreaks. Now, she is focusing on the history of vital statistics production—the ways governments have tracked births, abortions, marriages, and deaths.

Working in major news outlets with tight deadlines had left her somewhat disillusioned with the constraints on how the media report data. The COVID outbreak, and the need to spin up tracking dashboards almost overnight, only highlighted her concerns. “How do I walk the line of trying to build trust in the data while also saying, the data itself is really weird and complicated?” she says.

Now she is able to delve more intentionally into that complexity. She recently completed a master’s at Illinois Tech in Chicago, and she was invited to submit a paper to a workshop organized by the University of Edinburgh in Scotland.

Sara loves the archival research, the collaboration, and the more deliberate pace of academia, which leaves adequate time for reflection. “I have not been more fulfilled professionally ever in my life,” she says. Recently she was approached by an academic publisher who asked if she could produce a paper on a “very tight” turnaround of three months.

“I was like, yeah, I can do that,” she says, laughing. “I used to do that overnight.”