Dana Priest is the third Knight Chair in Public Affairs Journalism at University of Maryland. She is a two-time Pulitzer Prize winning reporter for The Washington Post and winner of the Peabody Award and duPont-Columbia Award for a PBS FRONTLINE film, The Facebook Dilemma. She teaches courses on global censorship and disinformation and national security reporting and co-founded the student organization Press Uncuffed which promotes the investigation and advocacy of free press issues in the United States and abroad. 

She is also on the board of directors of The Herblock Foundation and The Fauquier Times, a non-profit news outlet in Virginia.

Priest is an expert on U.S. intelligence and military matters, cybersecurity, disinformation, censorship and human rights, and in how Washington works and local news doesn’t yet. She is the author of two best-selling books, “The Mission: Waging War and Keeping Peace with America’s Military” (2003) and “Top Secret America” (2011). Her goals are to teach students how to find things out and to inspire them to investigate the actions of the U.S. government and other powerful institutions.