About The Author

Renee Dudley is a tech reporter at ProPublica. There, her 2019 series on ransomware found that U.S. companies, exploiting regulatory loopholes and sometimes misleading victims, secretly fostered the crime’s rise for their own profit. The articles won the 2020 TRACE Prize for Investigative Reporting and the 2019 SABEW Award for technology coverage. "The Ransomware Hunting Team," which she co-authored with ProPublica editor Daniel Golden, is based on the series and was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2022.

Previously, as an investigative reporter at Reuters, she was named a 2017 Pulitzer Prize finalist for her work uncovering systematic cheating on college admissions tests. The series prompted changes in the format and administration of the SAT. It was named a 2017 Loeb Award finalist and received the 2017 New York Press Club Award for consumer reporting.

Earlier in her career, she was a reporter at Bloomberg and at daily newspapers in South Carolina, where her work resulted in the resignation and indictment of a powerful state politician. She was named 2011 Journalist of the Year by the South Carolina Press Association and has won first-place honors from regional press groups for public service, in-depth, enterprise, health and government reporting. She also received the Eugene S. Pulliam First Amendment Award from the Society of Professional Journalists for exposing a South Carolina law that kept vital public records secret. The law was repealed as a result of her reporting.

Renee was a full-tuition Cardinal Medeiros Scholar at Boston University, where she earned her B.S. and B.A. studying journalism, international relations and French. She lives in Massachusetts with her husband and three young children.