Jeff Smith of The Washington Post visits school

Jeff Smith, national investigative correspondent for The Washington Post, is visiting classes in the school for two days as part of the Hearst Visiting Professionals program. His coverage has included political corruption, intelligence matters, national political candidates and counter-terrorism efforts.

Along with two colleagues, Smith won the Pulitzer Prize in 2006 for coverage of the scandals surrounding lobbyist Jack Abramoff.

From 1998 to 2001, he was the paper’s bureau chief in Rome covering the conflicts in Kosovo and Macedonia, political revolution in Yugoslavia, the Vatican and other regional affairs.

In 2006, he and two other Post reporters also received the Selden Ring Award for Investigative Reporting and the Worth Bingham prize. That year, he was also a finalist for the Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting. In 1997, he was First Runner-Up for the Edwin Hood Award for Diplomatic Correspondence. In 1986, he received the National Magazine Award for Public Interest from the American Society of Magazine Editors. In 1984, he received the Citation for Excellence, Best Magazine Story on Foreign Affairs from the Overseas Press Club. The National Association of Science Writers honored him with its Science-in-Society Journalism Award twice, in 1982 and 1979.

Smith joined The Post in 1986 as National Security Correspondent, covering defense, intelligence matters and foreign policy, including policymaking at the State Department, Pentagon and White House; conflict and terrorism in the Middle East; politics in Asia; and arms proliferation. Prior to coming to The Post, Smith was a senior writer for the News and Comment section of Science Magazine in Washington, D.C., for nine years. There, he wrote about national security issues, the space program, regulations and the environment.

Smith was born in Chicago and received a bachelor’s degree in political science and public policy from Duke University and a master’s degree from the Columbia University School of Journalism. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. He was awarded a Jefferson Fellowship at the East-West Center in Hawaii in 1997, a fellowship at New York University’s Remarque Institute in 2001, and a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship in Bellagio, Italy, in 2002.