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Washington Post Correspondent Rajiv Chandrasekaran Named IRP Journalist-in-Residence at Johns Hopkins SAIS

Rajiv Chandrasekaran

Washington – Rajiv Chandrasekaran, who has just finished an 18-month assignment as the Baghdad bureau chief for The Washington Post, has been awarded the “International Reporting Project Journalist-in-Residence” fellowship at The Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS).

Chandrasekaran, who has been in Baghdad since April 2003, will use the fellowship to work on a book about the U.S. occupation of Iraq. His six-month fellowship will begin December 1, 2004.

At SAIS, Chandrasekaran will work within the International Reporting Project, which awards a variety of fellowships to U.S. journalists focusing on international issues. Previous IRP Journalists in Residence who have written books on international topics have included Joyce Davis of Knight Ridder Newspapers, Pamela Constable of The Washington Post, R. Jeffrey Smith of The Washington Post, Stephen Glain of the Wall Street Journal, Peter Bergen of CNN, David Lamb of the Los Angeles Times and Paul Blustein of The Washington Post.

As Baghdad bureau chief for The Post, Chandrasekaran has had primary responsibility for covering the U.S. intervention in Iraq, focusing on political and military issues. He has supervised a team of American correspondents and more than 20 Iraqi staffers. Before arriving in Baghdad in 2003, he was The Post’s Cairo bureau chief, covering Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Yemen, Oman, Libya, Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco.

Previously, he was The Post’s Southeast Asia bureau chief, based in Jakarta. From September 2001 he was part of the newspaper’s team covering the war in Afghanistan. Before becoming a foreign correspondent in 1999, he was The Post’s Washington-based national technology correspondent and covered the Microsoft antitrust trail and regulatory issues involving the technology industry.

Chandrasekaran joined The Post in 1994 as a reporter on the metropolitan staff. A native of the San Francisco Bay area, he holds a degree in political science from Stanford University, where he was editor-in-chief of The Stanford Daily.

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