Lisa S. Chedekel ’82

Lisa S. Chedekel, a journalist and educator, died Jan. 12, 2018. She was 57. After graduating with a degree in English, she worked at the now-defunct New Haven Advocate. Two years later she joined the New Haven Register. In 1992 she moved to the Hartford Courant, and a year later she was a member of a team of Courantreporters who won the Pulitzer Prize for breaking news coverage of the deadly shooting rampage at the Connecticut Lottery Corp. She also traveled to a Mexican sweatshop that produced apparel for the University of Connecticut and revealed that the university’s athletic director and coaches were swapping game tickets for cars with a sponsor. She switched to political coverage in 2000. In 2002 she spent 10 days in Saudi Arabia to gauge the country’s sentiment towards the United States a year after the 9/11 attacks. One of her most championed pieces was “Mentally Unfit, Forced to Fight,” a 2006 investigative series with another Courant staff writer that exposed the military in violation of its own rules by sending mentally ill soldiers to war in Iraq and Afghanistan. The series won many awards and was a finalist for another Pulitzer Prize. In 2008, she left the Courant and began writing for the Boston University School of Public Health and teaching journalism at Northeastern University. Survivors include her wife, Dr. Isabel Morais; two children; and a cousin, Alexander Rosen ’08.