Deborah Nelson, a winner of the Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting, joined the Northern Star as a reporter in 1974, the year she arrived at NIU. Deborah was already a senior, having transferred from Arizona State University. Deborah’s friends and colleagues at the paper recall that she was a thoughtful, careful reporter whose personable approach often took people by surprise. There was nothing cynical about her reporting, just a focused, relentless search for the facts and what they meant to her readers.

While at the Star, Deborah reported on the Illinois Board of Higher Education. “It was going to those meetings … that I learned to dig beyond what officials say and to find the facts,” she told the Star Alumni newsletter in 1997.

Deborah graduated from NIU with a B.S. degree in journalism in 1975. After graduation, she worked as a reporter for the Daily Herald, and then for the Chicago Sun-Times, where she spent 10 years. Deborah joined the Seattle Times in 1995.

In 1996, she received a telephone tip that eventually lead to the Pulitzer Prize. Deborah was told by the caller to check out the home of the housing director for an Indian reservation located north of Seattle. She and a photographer hiked through the woods to find a magnificent house built with taxpayer money. That trek was the beginning of a coast-to-coast investigation of Indian housing programs run by the federal government. The resulting series of stories, published in December 1996 by the Seattle Times, caused a federal investigation of tribal housing programs, and earned Deborah, as well as two other reporters, the Pulitzer.

Deborah has returned to the NIU campus in recent years to discuss her career and the challenges facing young reporters. In 1995, she returned to accept the Journalism Alumnus of the Year Award and, in 1997, she addressed the Northern Illinois Newspaper Association.

Deborah joined the Washington Post in September 1999, where she is a member of the paper’s investigative unit. She currently is writing articles on gene therapy experiments.

Deborah and her husband, Tom Brune (a reporter for Newsday of New York and a Pulitzer Prize finalist), live in Takoma Park, Md., with their daughters, Molly and Anna.