The New York Times names new reporters on Visual Investigations desk

Sanjana Varghese (Photo credit: Amara Eno)

We are excited to welcome Sanjana Varghese and Ishaan Jhaveri as reporters on the Visual Investigations desk. They will both focus on ambitious investigative and explanatory work, primarily on competitive news stories, but will also contribute to longer-term projects with the rest of the team. Sanjana is based in London and Ishaan will join us full-time in New York as of July 1.

Sanjana joined the team in May and will use her open-source reporting skills to seize news moments and dig aggressively into a wide range of U.S. and international topics. She will source audio-visual evidence from a variety of platforms, geo- and chronolocate evidence, and analyze satellite imagery and data.

Sanjana joins the Visual Investigations team from the Airwars Investigations Unit, based at Goldsmiths, University of London. She’s worked on long-form investigations around conflict, arms transfers and human rights, using a range of open source and multimedia techniques. Her stories have examined how Iranian drones became a key weapon in Russia’s arsenal, identified victims of U.K. airstrikes in Iraq and Syria and reconstructed a deadly Dutch attack on civilians in Afghanistan.

Previously, she worked as a freelance journalist for a range of outlets, including Wired, Al Jazeera, The Economist and The New Statesman.

Sanjana was raised in Bahrain, and she has been based in London for nine years. She is a graduate of King’s College London and has a master’s degree in research architecture, with a focus on forensic architecture, from Goldsmiths, University of London.

Ishaan Jhaveri (Photo credit: Amar Ambani)

Ishaan Jhaveri started as a fellow on Visual Investigations in 2022. He brings a background in computer science to the work of the team. In the last two years on V.I. he has helped link Russian soldiers to their social media profiles, identified Chinese-language bots on X and used artificial intelligence tools to find evidence of widespread use by the Israeli military of 2,000-pound bombs in areas of Gaza marked safe for civilians, for which he shared in the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting.

Ishaan will continue to use his computer science-based reporting skills, and a strong understanding of A.I. tools and methodologies, to develop investigative reporting targets and break news.

He joined The Times from the Tow Center for Digital Journalism, where he co-built an app, VizPol, that helps journalists identify political symbols. Previously he worked at Gizmodo covering the intersection of technology and privacy.

Ishaan grew up in Mumbai and attended Cornell University, where he studied computer science and minored in English.

As members of our growing team, Sanjana and Ishaan will bolster our ability to connect the dots around chaotic events and hold power to account. Please join me in welcoming them both.