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.

So far in my career I have been able to produce informative and empowering data storytelling for folks such as the Assistant Secretary of State for Consular Affairs, the millions of readers of the various Dotdash Meredith brand sites, or the followers of the local DC housing & urbanism blog Greater Greater Washington, among others.

A few examples of my work include using extracting precinct-level election results data from PDFs for the nonprofit OpenElections, analyzing Bureau of Labor Statistics data to examine the recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic for Investopedia and The Balance and mapping bicycle crash accidents in the DC region for Greater Greater Washington.

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, webscraping, 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 before living in New York City lived in Washington, DC. I have been a member of the Investigative Reporters and Editors since 2020 and have attended their 2021 and 2022 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.