Robert Benincasa
Robert Benincasa is a computer-assisted reporting producer in NPR's Investigations Unit.
Since joining NPR in 2008, Benincasa has been reporting on NPR Investigations stories, analyzing data for investigations, and developing data visualizations and interactive applications for NPR.org. He has worked on numerous groundbreaking stories, including data-driven investigations of the inequities of federal disaster aid and coal miners' exposures to deadly silica dust.
Prior to NPR, Benincasa served as the database editor for the Gannett News Service Washington Bureau for a decade.
Benincasa's work at NPR has been recognized by many of journalism's top honors. In 2014, he was part of a team that won an Investigative Reporters & Editors Award, and he shared Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Awards with Investigations Unit colleagues in 2016 and 2011.
Also in 2011, he received numerous accolades for his contributions to several investigative stories, including an Edward R. Murrow Award for Excellence in Coverage of Trauma, an Investigative Reporters & Editors Radio Award, the White House News Photographers Association's Eyes of History Award for multimedia innovation, and George Polk and George Foster Peabody awards.
Benincasa served on the faculty of Georgetown University's Master of Professional Studies program in journalism from 2008 to 2016.
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Heat has killed hundreds of workers in the U.S., many in construction or agriculture, an investigation by NPR and Columbia Journalism Investigations found. Federal standards might have prevented them. -
Landfills are among the nation's largest sources of methane, a greenhouse gas far more potent than carbon dioxide. But accurately measuring methane is a major challenge to reducing it. -
Seven multi-million-dollar contracts are at the center of a House subcommittee probe. Investigators say the companies lacked experience and some had political connections to the Trump administration. -
The government's Paycheck Protection Program was intended to help small businesses during the pandemic keep workers on staff. But a lot of the recipients weren't exactly small businesses. -
In the government's hurried pandemic response, more than 250 companies, some with little or no medical supply experience, got contracts worth more than $1 million without fully competitive bidding. -
Car traffic took a big dip beginning in late March, and headlines celebrated clean air around the U.S. But an NPR analysis of EPA data tells a more troubling story. -
Faced with lost revenue from canceled elective procedures, hospitals laid off 1.4 million health care workers in April, including nearly 135,000 from hospitals. -
On March 13, President Trump promised to mobilize private and public resources to respond to the coronavirus. NPR followed up on each promise and found little action had been taken. -
Coal mining companies linked to billionaire Gov. Jim Justice and his family have agreed to pay the government more than $5 million in delinquent mine safety fines. -
An NPR analysis of the nation's 100,000 ICU beds finds some communities can accommodate far more critically ill patients than others, signaling potential disparities in care in the COVID-19 pandemic. -
Companies that sell dogs trained to sniff out life-threatening changes in blood sugar for people with diabetes have faced lawsuits or complaints from some of their customers. -
An international endangered species treaty that placed trade restrictions on rosewood is poised to exempt musical instruments from the regulations.
