Robin McDowell

Robin McDowell is an Investigative Reporter of the Associated Press. In 2016, along with Esther Htusan, Margie Mason and Martha Mendoza, she won the Pulitzer Prize in Public Service for their investigation into labor abuses in Southeast Asia’s fishing industry. Their reporting successfully freed over 2,000 slave laborers, brought perpetrators to justice and inspired reforms in the industry. Their work has also won them other journalism awards, including the George Polk Award for Foreign Reporting and the Barlett and Steele Award for Investigative Business Journalism.

McDowell is currently based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. But she spent much of the last two decades in Southeast Asia. She worked in Cambodia as chief correspondent for the Associated Press in the mid-1990s, covering a bloody coup and the final days of the Khmer Rouge, the name given to the followers of the Communist Party of Kampuchea in Cambodia. She also helped to set up the agency's regional editing desk in Thailand. Later, she spent six years as bureau chief in Indonesia. Most recently she was a correspondent in Associated Press office in Myanmar.