Sharon Otterman (1991, NY)

Sharon Otterman has been a New York Times reporter since 2008, primarily covering education, religion and breaking news for the Metro desk. She won a Polk Award for Justice Reporting in 2013 for her role in exposing a pattern of wrongful convictions in Brooklyn, and has reported extensively on patterns of sexual abuse in the Roman Catholic Church and in other institutions.

Sharon holds a bachelor’s degree in philosophy from Yale and a master’s in international relations from Columbia University. Before joining The Times, she was a Fulbright fellow in Egypt, an associate director at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington, D.C., the director of a media development program in Kosovo for the U.S. State Department, and the managing editor of The Slovak Spectator, an English-language newspaper in Bratislava, Slovakia.

She grew up in Merrick, Long Island, and was a 1991 Presidential Scholar from New York. She now lives on nearby Roosevelt Island with her husband, Raj, and their two young sons.