Robert Benincasa
Robert Benincasa is a computer-assisted reporting producer in NPR's Investigations Unit.
Since joining NPR in 2008, Benincasa has been reporting on NPR Investigations stories, analyzing data for investigations, and developing data visualizations and interactive applications for NPR.org. He has worked on numerous groundbreaking stories, including data-driven investigations of the inequities of federal disaster aid and coal miners' exposures to deadly silica dust.
Prior to NPR, Benincasa served as the database editor for the Gannett News Service Washington Bureau for a decade.
Benincasa's work at NPR has been recognized by many of journalism's top honors. In 2014, he was part of a team that won an Investigative Reporters & Editors Award, and he shared Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Awards with Investigations Unit colleagues in 2016 and 2011.
Also in 2011, he received numerous accolades for his contributions to several investigative stories, including an Edward R. Murrow Award for Excellence in Coverage of Trauma, an Investigative Reporters & Editors Radio Award, the White House News Photographers Association's Eyes of History Award for multimedia innovation, and George Polk and George Foster Peabody awards.
Benincasa served on the faculty of Georgetown University's Master of Professional Studies program in journalism from 2008 to 2016.
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NPR looks at grocery inflation and politics in Pittsburgh, a focus of both major presidential campaigns in their quest to woo voters in must-win Pennsylvania. -
A joint investigation by NPR, Texas Public Radio and the program 1A finds that more than 250 workers have died in trench cave-ins over the last decade. Deaths that were preventable, experts say.
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An NPR investigation finds that many people with VA loans who got a COVID forbearance are at risk of losing their homes. The VA has a fix, but it could be too late unless it halts foreclosures. -
At a hearing miners asked regulators to crack down on silica dust which causes lung cancer. They want rules to require more air monitoring and contain specifics about citations and fines.
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More than half of the counties in the nation's so-called Diabetes Belt also have high rates of medical debt among their residents, an NPR analysis found. -
Heat has killed hundreds of workers in the U.S., many in construction or agriculture, an investigation by NPR and Columbia Journalism Investigations found. Federal standards might have prevented them. -
Landfills are among the nation's largest sources of methane, a greenhouse gas far more potent than carbon dioxide. But accurately measuring methane is a major challenge to reducing it. -
A recent government report called the mine safety standard regulating deadly silica dust "out of date," and difficult to enforce. The Biden administration may finally change that standard. -
Most of the largest civil settlements for police killings were in liberal areas in the year after the Ferguson unrest. Now, lawyers say current protests are hardening political divisions on policing. -
Seven multi-million-dollar contracts are at the center of a House subcommittee probe. Investigators say the companies lacked experience and some had political connections to the Trump administration.
