AYZA OMAR

Ayza Omar began her career as a junior reporter at DawnNews in 2006.  She led a fruitful journey covering local and provincial news at the 24-hour Pakistani English-language news channel. Her finance education enabled her to cover financial and economic news in an informed manner.

Omar quickly made her way up the ladder and became the only full-time anchor at the Lahore bureau. She covered majority of the live and recorded programming at the station; most notably the Provincial Budgets (Year 2008 & 2009), the 2008 Pakistani Presidential Elections, the USA Presidential Elections and the South Punjab Floods. She also anchored daily live news bulletins from DawnNews Headquarters in Karachi.

Omar was a key founding producer in the longest and one of the more popular current affairs shows called ‘At Liberty’. More recently, she has co-produced and hosted a season of the traveling food show series, ‘For The Love Of Food’.

As a freelance journalist, Omar was Assistant Producer for a ‘Television for Environment’ documentary, ‘The Prince,’ which was aired on BBC late 2008. The film documented the journey of a young landlord’s mission to implement UN Millennium Development Goals in his village.

Omar is currently attending Columbia University’s MS Broadcast program on a Fulbright Scholarship. She was also awarded the Madam Vivian Wu Yen Innovation fund scholarship. She was appointed executive editor (formerly managing editor) of her class’ news website: www.nycinfocus.org.

Omar has enjoyed learning new video, and radio story-telling techniques at Columbia University. Always a curious person, Omar feels journalism enables her love for learning and communicating new developments. Her future goals include undertaking theoretical/political studies, which would facilitate transitioning her political and international affair reporting to a world-class level.
 

CHRISTOPHER LIVESAY

Christopher Livesay covers human rights and refugees for Uptown Radio. He's from Chandler, Ariz. and graduated from Arizona State University where he majored in Italian and Art History. Livesay was a one year Rotary Scholar in Antwerp, Belgium in 2001-02. Prior to coming to Columbia, Livesay worked as a museum professional at The Peggy Guggenheim Collection, La Biennale d’Arte in Venice, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. He is the co-founder and contributing editor of sicmagazine.org, an online magazine devoted to cultural and historical analysis. He has written for HuffingtonPost.com and reported for Marfa Public Radio, Texas.

GISELA PEREZ

Gisela Perez Mauri is a Catalan journalist from Barcelona covering the beat of International Affairs and Organizations for Uptown Radio. Her main interests in her beat are in Europe and Latin America.

She studied Journalism in Barcelona for her undergraduate education while she was interning for a local public radio station near her hometown. When she finished her degree, she interned for the Catalan TV and Radio Corporation in Barcelona for four months. After that, she worked as a reporter for a national newspaper in Andorra called ‘Diari d’Andorra’ for several months before she came to Columbia University.

Now, apart from working in the Radio Workshop, she is also working in her video documentary for her master project.
 

ISABELLE SCHAFER

Isabelle Schäfer is a French-German journalist, currently enrolled in the dual degree program between the Columbia Journalism School and the Journalism School of Sciences Po in Paris. She worked as an intern at AFP in Paris, as well as at the dpa (German Press Agency) and RFI in Buenos Aires. She also interned in a French local newspaper “L’Est Républicain” and in the German Embassy in Moscow. Before Columbia University, she studied political science at Sciences Po Paris and Russian politics at Birmingham University. She covers the environment for Uptown Radio. (Photo: Daniel Woolfolk)
 

JAMES DE MELLOW

James de Mellow is covering the city services beat for Uptown Radio, focusing on how New York's transport, welfare and housing systems are managed. James comes to Columbia from the UK, and hadn't done any radio reporting before September. He freelanced for a sports magazine whilst at Oxford University, but now has his sights set on a career on the airwaves."

JEN HOWARD

Jen Howard is a graduate student in broadcast journalism at Columbia University. She previously worked in sales, marketing, and sponsorship for Village Voice Media in New York, and The Philadelphia City Paper in Philadelphia. She attended the University of Texas at Austin, earning her bachelor’s degree in political communication in 2006. She grew up in various parts of the country, including Arizona, Kansas, Michigan and Texas, and is happy to have found a home in New York.

JENN CARMONA

Jenn Carmona is a religion reporter for Uptown Radio. After getting her
undergraduate degree in magazine journalism and Spanish from Syracuse University, she worked as a freelance editor for Remezcla.com, a series of Latin entertainment websites.

Jenn was a production intern for MTV Tr3s Radio Network in the summer of 2007. This experience gave her the passion to pursue radio. She wrote Latin entertainment updates and transcribed many interivews, including that year's Latin Alternative Music Conference.

Jenn is currently a broadcast concentrator at Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism where she is a broadcast concentrator. Her journalistic interests include race and ethnicity, Latin culture, religion/spirituality, entertainment, music, and social media reporting.

After graduation Jenn hopes to combine her love of multi-platform journalism with her love for Latin culture, feature writing and social media, and make a career out of it. When she's not sleeping at the J-School, you can find her wandering around the Lower East Side (even though she lives in the Bronx),  playing her piano, flute or bass guitar, or feeding her Internet addictions.
 
 

REBECCA THOMAS

Rebecca Thomas grew up in Luxembourg. Since leaving she has, among other things, been an editor for National Geographic, a translator for the British Embassy in Berlin and picked up a Masters degree in European history. Now she is an aspiring photo-, radio and print journalist. She currently writes for the Mount Hope Monitor, a Bronx
paper.
 

RUCHIKA TULSHYAN

Ruchika Tulshyan is a science reporter for Uptown Radio. She always thought the written word was the best way to report until she stumbled upon Radio and changed her mind. Ruchika was born and raised in Singapore, then completed her undergraduate degree in London. Ruchika was nearly going to start a career in banking, in London -- luckily, fate intervened. Now you can find her stories published in Forbes Woman, The Huffington Post, The Business Times Singapore, and Chic Today, and listen to her on Uptown Radio.

SARA BERTIN

Sara Bertin, is an economic reporter for Uptown Radio. Sara, a French national, is a full-time master’s student at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, specializing in broadcast.

Prior to joining the school, Sara was a professional economist. She started her career at the International Monetary Fund. As a vice president within the Sovereign Risk Unit at Moody’s, she spent seven years assessing the risk of governments defaulting on their debt within Europe and the developing world. She was based in London and Paris.

Sara has a Ph.D in economics from New York University and a master’s degree in banking and finance from the Pantheon Sorbonne, Paris.

SOLOMON ADEBAYO

Solomon Adebayo worked as an investigative reporter with Radio Nigeria, Sub-editor with Diet Newspaper in Lagos, and interned with the BBC in Bristol. Adebayo has diplomas in advanced international broadcast journalism from the Thomson Foundation Training Center in Cardiff, United Kingdom; writing environmental news from the Reuters Foundation in Nairobi, Kenya; and basic journalism from the Radio Nigeria in Lagos. Adebayo also has a B.A. in English from Ahmadu Bello University in Zaria, Nigeria. Adebayo's awards include the National Award for investigative reporting on Trans-border Child Trafficking 2009, Radio Reporter of the Year Diamond Award for Media Excellence in the radio category for Nigeria in both 2008 and 2009, best investigative and radio reporter of the year in Radio Nigeria's Excellence Award 2008, first prize winner of the Wole Soyinka Award for Investigative Reporting for three consecutive years: 2007, 2008 and 2009, and was a runner-up for the Shining Light Global Investigative Journalism Prize in Lillehammer, Norway 2008.