Before joining the Media and Community (MAC) Lab, Aaron worked for The Washington Post in newsroom engineering and as a founding member of the Reporting Tools team. In that role, he worked with editors, journalists and fellow engineers to build software to assist the reporting process. Some of his work (always in collaboration) includes the modernization of the Peabody-award winning Fatal Force Database, Haystacker (an LLM-assisted video forensics tool) and Datarunner a WaPo-internal template for managing scalable reporting data pipelines.
Aaron graduated from Columbia University in 2020 with master’s degrees in both journalism and computer science. Other brief stops along the way include Newsday, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, St. Louis Public Radio, Miami Herald, Los Angeles Times, The Tow Center and Consumer Reports.
Aaron’s design philosophy is: “less is more.” The fewer moving parts a piece of engineering has, the easier it is to build, and the easier it is to understand. This proves helpful in newsroom context where engineering and product resources are limited.