Meet the Team

Leah Clapman

Founder, Executive Director

Leah Clapman created Student Reporting Labs in 2009 as an experiment to engage middle and high school students with current events and reimagine public media for tweens and teens. Under her leadership, Student Reporting Labs has grown from 6 pilot sites to 180 schools in 46 states with partnerships extending from major media and online platforms to international education and youth initiatives. Leah has developed education products such as PBS NewsHour Classroom for teachers, Teachers Lounge and “Making the Grade,” a weekly focus on education issues, policy and practice. A Princeton graduate, she serves on the Education Writers Association journalism advisory, Education Innovators and Library of Congress TPS council.

Christine Zirneklis

Senior Manager of Communications and Partnerships

Victor Fernandez

Director, Youth Media Program

Victor is the PBS NewsHour Student Reporting Labs Director of our Youth Media Program. He makes sure that student pieces are ready for publishing on our website, social media platforms, and on the NewsHour broadcast. He gives technical feedback and detailed demonstrations on how to polish your video in the post production stage. He recently received the 2018 Instructional Media – Engaged Learning award from the National Educational Telecommunications Association where he was the editor for the SRL Level Up tutorial series. Victor worked as a Career and Technical Education teacher for 15 years in Miami-Dade County Public Schools where he prepared students for the Adobe Premiere Pro and Adobe Photoshop certifications. What Victor enjoys most about his job is visiting SRL schools and providing students with hand-on learning experiences. During his time off work he serves as the Student Production Awards Coordinator at the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences Suncoast Chapter and participates as a judge on college and high school film festivals.

Briget Ganske

Youth Media Producer

Briget is a multimedia storyteller and educator. She grew up in Iowa, exploring life with the Kodak camera her grandparents gave her. She earned her B.A. in English, creative writing from Northwestern University, studied documentary photography at The Salt Institute for Documentary Studies, and received her Ed.M. in arts in education from Harvard Graduate School of Education. For the past eight years, Briget has been a freelance photographer and video storyteller. She’s led photo and video workshops with youth in New York, South Africa, Boston, Maine, and Richmond. Before joining SRL, Briget was a videographer at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. She lives in Richmond, VA with her husband and two young sons. Briget also is the lead producer for SRL’s podcast on teen mental health, On Our Minds.

Rawan Elbaba

Digital Producer

Rawan is a Digital Producer at the PBS NewsHour Student Reporting Labs. She leads digital content strategy and manages SRL’s social media platforms. Rawan received her master’s degree in journalism at Georgetown University. She was born and raised in the Washington, DC area to Lebanese parents and is a first-generation American.

Marie Cusick

Editorial Director

Emily Anne Tkaczibson

Sr. Manager, Grants Administration

Emily Anne Tkaczibson is a grants professional and theatre artist who specializes in education programming for children, teens, and adults. She has worked with arts and culture organizations including Center Theatre Group, Literary Arts, South Coast Repertory, Inner-City Arts, and Public Media Group of Southern California (PBS SoCal). Emily currently resides with her husband in Portland, OR, where she spends her free time playing board games, reading books, and taking hikes. She also makes killer cheese and charcuterie boards.

Becky Wandel

Youth Media Producer

Jaylah Moore-Ross

Associate Producer

Jaylah is an Associate Producer at PBS NewsHour Student Reporting Labs (SRL), with a focus on content production, both in front and behind the camera. Jaylah is a very passionate multimedia storyteller who believes storytelling is essential in helping us navigate the world and better understand our peers. She is also passionate about mental health and collaborating with other motivated artists and is always eager to learn and improve her skills. She helps produce content for SRL and its Murrow Award-winning podcast, On Our Minds, and PBS NewsHour. She also created content for Snapchat and worked on two short films for the DC 48-Hour Film Festival. Some of her most notable work includes interviews with Madison Beer and Asia Jackson, working with students from LeBron James’s school, I Promise School, and Letter to My Middle School Self. As a former student journalist and 2019 Gwen Ifill Fellow, Jaylah believes in the importance of uplifting youth voices and providing impactful storytelling experiences and opportunities that help students storytellers who are committed to making an impact in their community. 

Anurag Papolu

Graphic Designer

Anurag is a multimedia producer and designer. In his previous role as the multimedia editor at The Conversation, he worked with scientists and scholars around the country to help them communicate their research through text, graphics, and video. His work has appeared in a wide variety of publications including The Washington Post, NBC, The Daily Beast, and Fast Company. He loves all things visual art and likes to learn and experiment with new creative techniques.

Chris Schwalm

Youth Media Producer

Chris Schwalm created the media production program at a Central Pennsylvania school district and developed the broadcast journalism and film production classes over his twenty-year tenure. He covered several municipalities as a journalist for the Lancaster News on nights and weekends for twelve of those years, and covered a three-state territory for a national publisher for five years. After a family move brought Chris, his wife, two daughters and two dogs to the Pacific Northwest during the summer of 2021, he served a short stint as the Digital Social Media Marketing Specialist for a large Seattle-Area school district before joining the SRL team as a Youth Media Producer – his dream job!

Emily Hope Dobkin

Community Engagement Manager

Emily’s role is to strengthen and build community on StoryMaker, ensuring the best possible user experience and teacher engagement. Emily comes to Student Reporting Labs after several years of connecting people to meaningful experiences within museums, marketplaces, libraries, after-school programs, cultural organizations, and during the pandemic: zoom rooms worldwide via The Meet Cart. In everything she does, Emily cares deeply about creating exploratory experiences that nourish curiosity, celebrate all voices, and spark storytelling. In her 14+ years working in the realms of education and informal learning spaces, she’s launched everything from teen programs that focus on arts for social change to her own platform called Betterish. Denver Westword has identified Emily as a “people person extraordinaire,” and she has further been dubbed a bridge builder, a connector, a joiner, and a facilitator of joy. For such reasons, she’s committed to dressing up as a Connectectasaurus Rex during Halloween season year after year. Rooted in east coast upbringings, expanded by some inspiring years of seafaring adventures along the Pacific coast, Emily now resides on a tree-lined street in Denver, Colorado overlooking the Rocky Mountains.

Jasmine Baker

Associate Producer, Social Media

Jasmine is an avid reader and dreamer. She works with social media, which makes sense with all the pop culture references she makes. Before working with PBS NewsHour Student Reporting Labs, she helped create multiple programs for high schoolers within Montgomery County. Specifically, the Minority Scholars Program promotes pride in one’s identity and inspires activism. She graduated from Montgomery College and is looking forward to continuing her journey with PBS NewsHour Student Reporting Labs.

Neianne Sambile

Associate, Grants and Data Projects