Adrian Nesta

My passion for data journalism stems from my belief in the power of information with context. Marrying the investigative and explanatory process of journalism with the analysis and presentation of data inspires most of my work trying to make sense of an increasingly complex world.

I am interested in macroeconomics, in particular the labor market and consumer economy. I am also intrigued by data on the various aspects of urban life: housing, transit, energy and other infrastructure, transportation and land use topics. I am particularly engaged in these issues and other parts of local governance in the New York City, Philadelphia, and Washington, DC areas.

So far in my career I have been able to produce informative and empowering data storytelling for the readers of the various Dotdash Meredith sites like Investopedia, Verywell Health, and The Balance, the NYC investigative non-profit City Limits, and the followers of the local DC housing & urbanism blog Greater Greater Washington, among others.

I have also done volunteer work extracting precinct-level election results data from PDFs for the nonprofit OpenElections as well as filing Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests to obtain, clean and document public data with the Data Liberation Project through MuckRock.

Some of the tools I have used for my work include using regular expressions and OCR, geocoding, big data cleaning and analysis with R, Python, and SQL, and automating updated data visualizations with Datawrapper and GitHub actions. I also have experience making maps and geoprocessing in QGIS, web scraping, bash scripting, and managing projects on GitHub with Git version control.

Born and raised in San Diego, California I graduated from the American University with a degree in International Studies in 2016 and have lived in Washington, DC, New York City, and Philadelphia. I have been a member of the Investigative Reporters and Editors since 2020 and have attended their 2021, 2022, and 2024 National Institute for Computer Assisted Reporting programs. When not cooking up data stories I enjoy following sports, especially baseball and basketball, playing chess, and re-watching a favorite movie.