As editor and director of communications at the USC Center for Religion and Civic Culture, Megan Sweas works with academic colleagues, journalists and faith leaders to share their insights. She translates research findings and program results into reports, articles, videos and more, with the goal of making the Center’s scholarship broadly accessible. She manages the Center’s website, leading two major redesigns.

Sweas directed the journalism fellowship as part of “Spiritual Exemplars: A Global Project on Engaged Spirituality,” a $2.5 million project funded by the John Templeton Foundation and Templeton Religion Trust. The project commissioned 80 journalism projects from fellows, along with two dozen in-house case studies of extraordinary humanitarians.

A freelance journalist, Sweas is the author of Putting Education to Work: How Cristo Rey High Schools are Transforming Urban Education (HarperOne, 2014). She has written about social and economic justice issues and world religions for the Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, YES! Magazine, Tricycle, Religion News Service, National Catholic Reporter and Religion Dispatches. She traveled to Italy in 2014 to report on Europe’s immigration crisis as a recipient of the International Reporting Project’s religion reporting fellowship.

Sweas previously covered politics and social issues as an editor at U.S. Catholic magazine, where she also ran the website. She was an Annenberg Fellow at the University of Southern California, where she earned a Master’s degree in specialized journalism. She graduated from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University.

Read more at MeganSweas.com.