The 'Morning Edition' Staff

You've met the hosts of Morning Edition — Steve Inskeep, Renee Montagne and David Greene. Who else works on the show? Here are some brief bios:

Reena Advani is an associate editor. She books guests, writes copy for the hosts and edits interviews. Reena was part of the team responsible for the show's special series marking 1979 as a seminal year in the Muslim world. She has brought a variety of voices to Morning Edition's air — including Jordan's King Abdullah II, tennis stars Andre Agassi and Serena Williams, former director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency Mohamed ElBaradei, onetime California gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman, actor Robert Duvall, and many authors and chefs. Prior to joining Morning Edition, Reena was a producer on NPR's foreign desk for 10 years. Reena is an East West Center fellow and participated in its first U.S.-Korea journalists' exchange. She has trained journalists in Nepal and serves as a mentor to Asian-American journalists.

Chinita Anderson is an editorial assistant. She conceived the 2012 music series "Summer Jams." Before joining NPR, she worked at Dow Jones Newswires and taught English in Japan. Chinita has traveled extensively in Southeast Asia, India, Europe, Australia and Southern Africa. Her areas of expertise are African-American-related topics, feminism and womanism, theater, pop culture, European monarchies and international travel.

Kitty Eisele, the show's supervising senior editor, writes the words that wake up listeners. Kitty has been at the center of network coverage for all major news events since 1998. Among series she's created: an ongoing look at "The Changing Lives of Women," a summer road trip to unusual cemeteries, and "The National Story Project" with writer Paul Auster, which she helped develop as editor of Weekend All Things Considered. Kitty began her career with filmmaker Ken Burns and received an Emmy Award for her work as a producer on The Civil War series. She is a 2015 Nieman Fellow at Harvard University and believes journalism is about sharing lives.

Nick Fountain is a production assistant. He's public radio through and through, having spent time at KUSP in Santa Cruz, KQED in San Francisco and WBUR in Boston. Originally from the east (Boston), he spent his college years out west (Santa Cruz) and still can't surf. In his spare time, he tells anyone who will listen about his garden, rides his bike, and tweets @nickfountain. He also produces NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour, NPR's weekly entertainment and pop culture roundtable podcast.

Barry Gordemer is an award-winning senior producer. He has helped produce coverage of two Persian Gulf wars, presidential elections, the Sept. 11 attacks and Hurricane Katrina. He's also produced many of the show's profiles of actors, musicians and writers. In 1999, Barry received special recognition from the George Foster Peabody Awards. A year later he created sound effects for and performed on the CD Dreamosaurus. It received a Grammy nomination for best musical album for kids.

Nina Gregory is an editor based at NPR West in Culver City. From breaking news to features, Nina has contributed to coverage ranging from finance to fashion. In addition to news about the business world and the economy, she is interested in the intersection of entertainment and technology. She has edited host interviews with authors, CEOs, government officials and the occasional rock star.

John Ketchum is an assistant producer/editor. Prior to joining the show, John was an assistant producer for ­Marketplace -- American Public Media's national business and economics program. John was part of a team of four reporters and producers covering poverty and the income divide in America. In 2010, he was a recipient of the Radio Television Digital News Association's Ed Bradley Award for outstanding media scholars. His career began in 2008, when he was a reporter for WCMU Public Radio in Mount Pleasant, Mich. At WCMU, he covered politics, education and the 2008 presidential election.

Travis Larchuk is an assistant producer based at NPR West. Travis started as an All Things Considered intern in 2008 and went on to direct many of NPR's live breaking news specials, including coverage of Osama bin Laden's death. His interests include interactive entertainment, technology, graphic novels, film and TV. He's the co-founder of Science Fiction Trope, a group of artists who use technology and theatrical techniques to create interactive, immersive storytelling experiences.

Kevin Leahy has produced interviews with newsmakers both high-profile and low-profile and musicians both professional and amateur. He's covered breaking news, helped get NPR's election night coverage on the air and represented Morning Edition at both national political conventions in 2012. Kevin is a production assistant and also sometimes directs the program, meaning he chooses the music and conducts the live broadcast from the control room.

Maeve McGoran is a senior editor. Previously, she was deputy editor of NPR's Washington bureau and a reporter in Washington, Philadelphia and New York. Before coming to NPR, she worked for WHYY's Fresh Air, at member stations WXPN in Philadelphia and WYSO in Yellow Springs, Ohio, and as an independent documentary producer. Her work has won a number of awards. Recent projects include Morning Edition's series on Cuba, Puerto Rico, paying for college, commuting and bilingual culture. Some of her most memorable assignments include getting NPR journalists into Haiti in the hours after the 2010 earthquake — making NPR one of the first news organizations in after the disaster — and editing Leroy Sievers' groundbreaking My Cancer blog on www.npr.org. She is based in Miami.

David McGuffin joined Morning Edition as a line editor in 2011. He brings to his work a deep knowledge of and interest in international affairs, having spent 13 years working as a foreign correspondent based in Moscow, Beijing, Rome and Nairobi, primarily for CBC News. He has reported from conflict zones in Afghanistan, Somalia, Darfur and Congo and covered events as wide-ranging as the FIFA World Cup and G-8 economic summits. He also spent a year and a half setting up a radio news service in South Sudan. This is his second tour in Washington, D.C., having gotten his start in journalism at the PBS NewsHour, back when it was still MacNeil/Lehrer. Don't get him started about hockey.

Molly Messick is a producer and editor. Before joining Morning Edition, she was an award-winning reporter for NPR member stations in Wyoming and Idaho, where she focused on energy, the environment and rural economies as well as the intersection of culture and politics. Molly graduated from Brown University with a degree in public policy and holds an M.S. from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.

Lauren Migaki is a production assistant and occasionally directs the program. She began as a Morning Edition intern in 2010. In her years with the program, she has produced numerous breaking news stories and interviews in addition to working on many music, book and television features. Lauren also produces Pop Culture Happy Hour.

Emily Ochsenschlager is a producer and editor. She began her career at NPR in the fall of 2003 and since then has helped produce coverage of the 2004 hurricane season, 2004 and 2006 elections, Hurricane Katrina and the Gulf Coast oil spill. Emily has also helped produce her share of interviews with musicians, authors and politicians. Emily is a 2003 graduate of the University of the South (Yea, Sewanee's Right!). When she's not producing radio pieces, you can find her running on the many trails of Washington, D.C.

Ammad Omar is an editor and producer. His responsibilities include ensuring the editorial integrity and vision of the program and crafting segments with hosts and producers. Ammad started at NPR in 2011, when he became an editor at Tell Me More with Michel Martin. He regularly participated in the program's signature Barbershop roundtables — discussing politics, sports and pop culture — and in weekly letters-to-the-editor segments. Prior to that, he was a freelance reporter, host, producer and editor at WBEZ in Chicago. Ammad started his career anchoring evening news broadcasts at the satellite TV station Indus Vision in Karachi, Pakistan. He has an unhealthy obsession with the University of Michigan football team, which not coincidentally shares a campus and name with the college Ammad attended.

Vince Pearson, an associate producer, joined the show in 2006. His responsibilities include editing and producing pieces, directing, and coordinating the show's music coverage. Before Morning Edition, Vince worked at All Things Considered for a year. And prior to that, he worked at NPR stations in California, Utah and Washington, D.C.

Maggie Penman is a production assistant. She has helped produce coverage of breaking news stories as well as features on books, music, technology and the arts. She got her start in radio at WNYC's The Takeaway, where she helped to produce coverage of the 2012 presidential election.

Jessica Pupovac is an editor and producer. She moved into this role in 2013 after serving as data and digital coordinator for StateImpact, a cross-platform collaboration between NPR and local member stations that examined how government decisions affect people's lives. Before coming to NPR, Jessica won awards for her investigative journalism focusing on criminal justice issues and government transparency.

Arezou Rezvani is an assistant editor. She graduated in 2012 as a dean's scholar from the USC Annenberg Graduate School of Journalism, where she reported on the underground beef market in India, the challenges faced by an emerging class of entrepreneurs in Cuba, and the treatment of the minority Kurdish population in eastern Turkey. Previously, Arezou was a project associate at the Knight Digital Media Center, an organization that provides new media training for journalists at all levels. Before that, she was the educational outreach associate for the Emmy Award-winning film company Promises Films. She speaks Persian and conversational French.

Shannon Rhoades started with Morning Edition in 2000, working with Susan Stamberg (her first day on the job was spent at the National Gallery of Art, and she knew it was a happy match). She is now a senior supervising editor based at NPR West. Shannon covers books, movies and television but has also edited Renee Montagne's coverage from Afghanistan, Steve Inskeep's road trip along the U.S.-Mexico border and David Greene's reporting from Cuba.

Ricardo Sandoval-Palos is a supervising editor. He is a veteran journalist with three decades of experience as an editor, investigative reporter and foreign correspondent. Ricardo is president of the board of directors at the nonprofit Fund for Investigative Journalism. Before joining NPR, he edited international investigations for the Center for Public Integrity. From 1997 to 2006, Ricardo was a Latin America correspondent, covering crime, conflict and business for the Dallas Morning News and Knight Ridder. Over the years he has won numerous awards, including top honors for investigative work from the Overseas Press Club, the Inter-American Press Association, the Society of Professional Journalists and the Loeb Awards for Business Journalism. He is co-author of the biography The Fight in the Fields: Cesar Chavez and the Farmworkers Movement, published by Harcourt.

Leah Scarpelli, a producer, started as an intern in the fall of 2007. Leah has written and produced many breaking news reports but specializes in covering a diverse range of music and arts pieces, including stories she reports herself. Leah has done work for NPR's The Picture Show blog and NPR Music and helped launch the monthly on-air series "Heavy Rotation." She sometimes directs Morning Edition's live broadcast and produces the show's daily promotional material.

Arnie Seipel is an editor. He has been with Morning Edition since 2012, contributing to the program's analysis of foreign and domestic news and bringing voices to the air to help listeners understand politics and the ways of Washington. Before joining the show, Arnie worked in various roles at NPR and was a producer on NPR's election team during the 2012 campaign. He produced a range of coverage on-air and online, in addition to working in the field to coordinate production of NPR's live coverage during primaries, conventions, debates and election night.

Selena Simmons-Duffin has (for work) eaten fruit bat with voters in Tampa, Fla., gone clubbing in Puerto Rico and been pulled over (several times) by the Border Patrol on the U.S.-Mexico border. She's an assistant producer and also reports for NPR on occasion and directs the show. She's always scheming up some new project to make radio and the Internet more awesome.

Cara Tallo is the show's senior supervising producer. She collaborates with show and desk managers to program the daily show and set priorities for future coverage. Cara also coordinates story assignments and staffing for the 24-hour-a-day, six-day-a-week staff. Before assuming her current role, she worked as Morning Edition overnight supervisory producer.

Lindsay Totty is an associate producer/director. He's the guy responsible for selecting the music that airs at the end of each segment. Lindsay started in radio as a DJ on the campus station at Amherst College, where he studied English and graduated magna cum laude. He live tweets concerts he goes to and explains the jokes behind the music interludes @lindsaytotty.

Rachel Ward is a producer. She advocates for member station interests and content. Rachel often leads the team that puts the show together in the overnight hours. She joined Morning Edition in 2012 after serving as the editor for The Innovation Trail, a collaboration of upstate New York public broadcasters covering the innovation economy. Rachel has been a reporter and host at WXXI in Rochester, N.Y., and WOUB in Athens, Ohio. She got her start in radio at WRUW in Cleveland. Rachel has a master's degree in telecommunications from Ohio University. She's interested in stories about art and fashion, comedy, prison reform and Africa. She does improv regularly, competitive karaoke periodically, and autocross quickly. Her ukulele cover of the Pixies' "Here Comes Your Man" has been listened to over 120 times on SoundCloud, mostly by her dad.

Tracy Wahl is the executive producer, responsible for setting the daily and long-term editorial strategies for the program. Since joining NPR in 1997, Tracy has produced a wide range of radio and multimedia pieces from across the U.S. and around the world. Highlights of her tenure include producing coverage from the Gulf Coast during Hurricane Katrina, reports from north of the Arctic Circle, and coverage from Karachi, Pakistan.

Kenya Young is an editor and producer. She started working at NPR in 2007 as an intern for the diverse talk program News & Notes, where she eventually became the director. She has produced for several NPR programs including Day To Day, Weekend All Things Considered, Tell Me More and Talk of The Nation. In addition to show production, Kenya has been a part of special coverage teams during the 2008 and 2012 elections, the 10th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks, and live coverage of the Sandy Hook school shootings and the Boston Marathon bombing. Kenya's particular news interests include education, income inequality, parenting and race.

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