Ken Armstrong – Doctor of Political Science

Ken Armstrong
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Ken Armstrong is an investigative reporter whose work has appeared in such places as The New Yorker, The Washington Post, The Paris Review, and This American Life. He currently works for ProPublica, a nonprofit news organization dedicated to investigative journalism.

Armstrong won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for explanatory reporting, for a story about a young woman who was raped, then charged with lying about it. He won the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting, for a three-part series on thousands of fatal overdoses linked to a cheap painkiller pushed by the state of Washington. He also shared in two other Pulitzers awarded to the staff of The Seattle Times for breaking news. He has won a Peabody Award for radio and the John Chancellor Award from Columbia University for lifetime achievement.

His first book, Scoreboard, Baby: A Story of College Football, Crime, and Complicity, written with Nick Perry, won the Edgar Allan Poe Award for non-fiction. In 2018 he wrote, with T. Christian Miller, A False Report: A True Story of Rape in America, named an Editors’ Choice by The New York Times.

Armstrong has worked at newspapers in Colorado, Idaho, California, New York, Alaska, Virginia, Illinois, and Washington. At the Chicago Tribune, he dug into hundreds of capital cases, an investigation that helped prompt the governor to halt executions and empty death row. He has been a Nieman Fellow at Harvard and the McGraw Professor of Writing at Princeton.

At Purdue University, Armstrong was editor of The Exponent. He graduated in 1985 with a bachelor’s degree in political science. He lives with his wife, Ramona Hattendorf, in Seattle, Washington. They have two children, Emmett and Skye.