Profiles

Alexandra Ellerbeck, CPJ’s North America program coordinator, previously worked at Freedom House and was a Fulbright teaching fellow at the State University of Pará in Brazil. She has lived in Chile, Bolivia and Brazil.

Jan-Albert Hootsen, CPJ’s Mexico representative for the Americas program, works as a correspondent for Dutch newspaper Trouw, and regularly contributes to publications including Newsweek and RTL Nieuws. He is based in Mexico City. Follow her on LinkedIn.

Katherine Jacobsen is CPJ’s U.S., Canada, and Caribbean program coordinator. Before joining CPJ as a news editor in 2017, Jacobsen worked for The Associated Press in Moscow and as a freelancer in Ukraine, where her writing appeared in outlets including Businessweek, U.S. News and World Report, Foreign Policy, and Al-Jazeera. Follow her on LinkedIn.

Aliya Iftikhar is CPJ’s Senior Asia Researcher. Prior to joining CPJ, Iftikhar was a research assistant at the Middle East Institute and interned at the U.S. Department of State. She has worked with Amnesty International and written for Vice News.

Tom Gibson is CPJ’s lead advocate in Brussels, covering the EU. Before joining CPJ, Gibson managed Protection International’s Burundi and Congo desks, advocating for stronger state accountability for the protection of human rights defenders and journalists. Gibson was also part of Amnesty International’s Africa program in London and Nairobi.

Muthoki Mumo is CPJ’s sub-Saharan Africa representative. She is based in Nairobi, Kenya, and has a master’s in journalism and globalization from the University of Hamburg.

Nicole Schilit is CPJ’s Journalist Assistance Program Coordinator. She has a master’s in public administration from the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University and a bachelor’s in documentary photography from Oberlin College in Ohio.

Özgür Öğret is a Turkish freelance journalist and CPJ’s Turkey representative. He was lead researcher for the 2012 CPJ special report, “Turkey’s Press Freedom Crisis.”

Alexandra Ellerbeck, CPJ’s North America program coordinator, previously worked at Freedom House and was a Fulbright teaching fellow at the State University of Pará in Brazil. She has lived in Chile, Bolivia and Brazil.

Can Dündar is editor-in-chief of Özgürüz (“We are free”), which he co-founded after going into exile in 2016. As editor-in-chief of the Turkish opposition daily newspaper Cumhuriyet, he spent 92 days in pretrial detention on charges related to the newspaper’s publication in 2015 of an article alleging Turkey’s intelligence agency was arming Syrian rebels under…