Pulitzer Prize winner to lead fellowship
Pulitzer Prize-winning Dave Umhoefer will be joining the Diederich College of Communication to serve as the interim O'Brien Fellowship Director.
Umhoefer is a public affairs reporter at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. The La Crosse, Wis., native graduated with a journalism degree from the University of Wisconsin — Madison before joining the West Bend News staff and later the Milwaukee Journal and merged Journal Sentinel, where he worked as an editor, government beat reporter and investigative reporter.
He is a longtime adjunct professor at Marquette in the Diederich College of Communication, and as a Marquette O’Brien Fellow in 2015–16 produced a series of reports on the impact of the Act 10 collective bargaining limits on K-12 public education in Wisconsin.
As a member of the Journal Sentinel’s Watchdog reporting team, he won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for local reporting for his investigation into pension padding by Milwaukee County officials. He is a longtime member of the paper’s PolitiFact Wisconsin fact-checking service.
The resident of Milwaukee’s Story Hill neighborhood is the father of Emily and Ben, grandfather of Louisiana and Robert, significant other to Gretchen Schuldt, and servant to Abe and Tennessee Petunia, the family dogs.
I also want to thank the committee that worked hard and on a short timeline to get this hire done. The committee was chaired by Ana Garner and also included John Pauly, Karen Slattery, George Stanley, and Greg Borowski.
— Kimo Ah Yun, Ph.D., Dean of the Diederich College of Communication
William R. Burleigh and E.W. Scripps Professor
