Ryan Thornburg
Associate Professor
Chapel Hill, North Carolina, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolRyan Thornburg is an associate professor and interdisciplinary leader who blends more than two decades of newsroom product experience with a dozen years of academic leadership, focusing on data, journalism and civic engagement. He designs hands‑on curricula and runs collaborative programs that turn messy public data into practical reporting tools and sustainable local news services. At UNC he has led a multidisciplinary lab, managed six‑figure budgets, and shipped real newsroom products—prioritizing solutions that journalists actually use rather than demos. He’s known for a coaching style that emphasizes clarity, revision, and work that “holds up” in the real world, mentoring students across journalism, statistics, computer science, business and law. His career bridges legacy outlets (including washingtonpost.com and U.S. News) and academic innovation, and he quietly excels at operationalizing projects that move from prototype to ongoing service. Based in Chapel Hill, he brings a pragmatic mix of editorial judgment, technical fluency, and program-building experience to civic‑minded data work.
12 years of coding experience
12 years of employment as a software developer
MA, Political Management, MA, Political Management at The George Washington UniversityBA, Journalism/Political Science, BA, Journalism/Political Science at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Github Skills (21)
elections5
r4
fetch4
django-project4
excel4
python3
django3
xls3
thunderbird3
xlsx3
spreadsheet3
data-journalism2
postgresql2
database2
komodo2
Programming languages (5)
Github contributions (5)
rtburg/MEJO570-Spring2020
Dec 2019 - Apr 2020
Contributions:79 commits, 47 pushes, 3 branches in 3 months
carolinadatadesk/NC-Public-Health-Data
Dec 2020 - May 2023
final-project-template-dominickferrara created by GitHub Classroom
Contributions:46 pushes, 1 branch in 2 years 5 months
templatetailwindcssgithub-classroom
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