Sacha Pfeiffer
Sacha Pfeiffer is a correspondent for NPR's Investigations team and an occasional guest host for some of NPR's national shows.
Pfeiffer came to NPR from The Boston Globe's investigative Spotlight team, whose stories on the Catholic Church's cover-up of clergy sex abuse won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service, among other honors. That reporting is the subject of the movie Spotlight, which won the 2016 Oscar for Best Picture.
Pfeiffer was also a senior reporter and host of All Things Considered and Radio Boston at WBUR in Boston, where she won a national 2012 Edward R. Murrow Award for broadcast reporting. While at WBUR, she was also a guest host for NPR's nationally syndicated On Point and Here & Now.
At The Boston Globe, where she worked for nearly 18 years, Pfeiffer also covered the court system, legal industry and nonprofit/philanthropic sector; produced investigative series on topics such as financial abuses by private foundations, shoddy home construction and sexual misconduct in the modeling industry; helped create a multi-episode podcast, Gladiator, about the life and death of NFL player Aaron Hernandez; and wrote for the food section, travel pages and Boston Globe Magazine. She shared the George Polk Award for National Reporting, Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting and Selden Ring Award for Investigative Reporting, among other honors.
At WBUR, where she worked for about seven years, Pfeiffer also anchored election coverage, debates, political panels and other special events. She came to radio as a senior reporter covering health, science, medicine and the environment, and her on-air work received numerous awards from the Radio & Television News Directors Association and the Associated Press.
From 2004-2005, Pfeiffer was a John S. Knight journalism fellow at Stanford University, where she studied at Stanford Law School. She is a co-author of the book Betrayal: The Crisis in the Catholic Church and has taught journalism at Boston University's College of Communication.
She has a bachelor's degree in English and history, magna cum laude, and a master's degree in education, both from Boston University, as well as an honorary doctorate of humane letters from Cooper Union.
Pfeiffer got her start in journalism as a reporter at The Dedham Times in Massachusetts. She is also a volunteer English language tutor for adult immigrants.
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A Gitmo judge has reinstated plea deals with three 9/11 defendants, ruling that Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin was wrong to rescind them.
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After plea deals in the 9/11 case were quickly reversed by Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, NPR has joined a petition for the deals to be unsealed by the U.S. military commissions.
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The previous agreements exchanged guilty pleas from the men for sentences of at most, life in prison. -
Mohammed and two accomplices agreed to plead guilty in exchange for sentences of up to life in prison rather than face a death-penalty trial. -
The U.S. Defense Department has reached a plea agreement with three of the five men charged in the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks, including alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammad.
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After a stroke left Howard Blatt unable to speak, he helped create a support group for other people with aphasia, a brain condition that impairs communication. He recently died at age 88. -
Ancestry.com has released a new free database of tens of thousands of old newspaper records about formerly enslaved people. The company hopes it will help fill historical gaps for Black Americans.
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Thirty environmental, healthcare and labor groups filed a petition urging federal government to include heat and wildfire smoke in its definition of “major disaster.”
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The U.S. Olympic swimming trials are continuing in Indianapolis. More than 1,000 athletes are trying to make a 60-member squad. The stories of triumph and agony are equally compelling.
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NPR's Sacha Pfeiffer talks with Rodrigo Barquera, a researcher at the Max-Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany, about a study revealing a surprise about ancient Mayan sacrifices.
