Alumnus Nick Thieme Credits CMU in Pulitzer Prize Win

This marks the second Pulitzer Prize for Dietrich College faculty and alumni announced in 2025

Just over a decade after graduating from Carnegie Mellon University’s Department of Statistics & Data Science, Nick Thieme (DC 2013) has been awarded a Pulitzer Prize for local reporting.

Thieme, along with his former colleagues at The Baltimore Banner, Alissa Zhu and Jessica Gallagher, published a “compassionate investigative series that captured the breathtaking dimensions of Baltimore’s fentanyl crisis and its disproportionate impact on older Black men, creating a sophisticated statistical model that The Banner shared with other newsrooms,” according to the Pulitzer Prize announcement. The series was also published by The New York Times as part of the newspaper’s Local Investigations Fellowship.

Interestingly, Thieme said his talent for using data to tell rich, compelling stories began right here in Pittsburgh.

“I used the exact same methods that I learned at CMU,” said Thieme, now an AI data scientist at Aperio Global, as well as an adjunct professor of computer science and journalism at Columbia University.

“The class that really shaped me was Advanced Data Analysis with Cosma Shalizi,” he said. “It’s a big, big part of why we won that Pulitzer.”

That’s so CMU

When he entered college, Thieme did not have a strong background in math.

“I started at CMU as an ethics, history and public policy major. I came in with absolutely no calculus and an interest in philosophy,” said Thieme. “It’s a very CMU thing, I think, to take a person like me and teach them math.”

But all it took was one entry-level calculus class during the fall of his sophomore year, and Thieme was hooked.

“I just found it interesting. It opened up a whole new world of intellectual exploration, and I just started banging out math classes one after another,” remembered Thieme.

During his senior year, Shalizi introduced Thieme to the idea of generalized additive models, or GAMs — the very same inferential tools he used while analyzing overdose data for his reporting at The Baltimore Banner, tools Thieme now teaches to his own students at Columbia University.

Shalizi, associate professor in the Statistics and Machine Learning departments, remembered Thieme fondly.

“I've taught easily over 1,000 students in that class since 2011, and lots of them have been very smart, but none of them have been more thoughtful about statistics than Nick,” said Shalizi. “It was obvious he was going to go out and make the world a better place, and I couldn't be happier about how he's using what he learned at CMU.”

Richard Scheines, the Bess Family Dean of the Marianna Brown Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences, echoed those sentiments.

"This is another great example of the power of interdisciplinary education at work,” said Scheines, “something I consider Dietrich's and CMU's secret sauce." 

Life-changing education, life-changing work

A Pulitzer Prize is just one of the accolades Thieme and his colleagues’ have received over the past few weeks.

The team also earned a George Polk Award, a Frank A. Blethen Award for Local Accountability Reporting from the Poynter Institute, and a Scripps Howard Journalism Award, as well as being named finalists for the 2025 Livingston Awards.

But what has meant the most to Thieme are the outcomes that have emerged from his data analysis and reporting.

“Our second story focused on a generation of older Black men who have been dying from overdose basically their whole lives,” explained Thieme.

In that particular piece, Thieme and his team used autopsy data to reveal that Baltimore’s homes for seniors were previously unrealized epicenters for the crisis. For instance, one home had multiple older Black men killed by overdose in a single day. Overall, more than 340 people over the age of 50 died in such facilities since 2018.

Fortunately, as a direct result of their reporting, the Maryland Department of Aging recently bestowed a $50,000 grant to a nonprofit mixed-income housing developer known as The Community Builders in order to address these very issues.

“I can’t overstate how effective that article was in getting the attention we needed on this issue,” Shanda Brown, director of regional community services for The Community Builders, told The Banner in March.

The grant is just one of many new targeted solutions to stem from Thieme and his colleagues’ reporting. In another example, the West Baltimore Renaissance Foundation has put up $553,000 to fund a partnership aimed at reducing fatal overdoses in affordable senior housing. Here too, the foundation’s executive director cited The Banner’s reporting in bringing the issue to the organization’s attention.

“Carnegie Mellon Statistics & Data Science majors have a long history of using statistical modeling tools to tackle important societal issues, and Nick is the perfect example,” said Rebecca Nugent, the Stephen E. and Joyce Fienberg Professor of Statistics & Data Science. “The impact of his and his team’s work will be profound, and we couldn’t be prouder.”

“CMU took a chance on me,” said Thieme. “And it genuinely changed the course of my life.”

Clearly, countless other peoples’ lives have been changed, too, as a result of Thieme’s data storytelling skills. 

View Thieme’s award-winning series on Baltimore’s fentanyl crisis at The Baltimore Banner and The New York Times.