Before he joined a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporting team at the Washington Post, John Muyskens was once a student reference assistant at the Hekman Library.

This April, John was one of a team of 23 Washington Post journalists credited with the work that won the 2016 Pulitzer for National Reporting. 

Last year, as a new Graphics Editor at the Post, John was tasked with building a database that would track data about police shootings nationwide. This database would become an integral part of the Post's Pulitzer-winning coverage.

The database of police shootings (which you can access here) filled a practical need at first; nobody at the time was systematically tracking where, when, and how people had been killed by the police. Martin Baron, executive editor of the Post, explained: “Basic facts were missing because police are not required to report fatal shootings to the FBI. The Post’s writers and editors sought to fill that enormous information gap." 

Now the database itself has become part of the Post's reporting in a series called Fatal Force. It tracks fatalities by state, age, gender, race, level of threat, weapons involved, and if victims showed signs of mental health problems. This database, alongside in-depth reporting of police shooting stories, was the project that won honors from the Pulitzer committee this April.

John graduated from Calvin in December 2014 with a computer science major and a math minor and landed his job as a Graphics Editor at the Washington Post shortly after.

See John's current work for the Washington Post here: https://www.washingtonpost.com/people/john-muyskens

 - article by proud sister, Carolyn Muyskens '17