ProPublica Illinois announced today that Vignesh Ramachandran will join its staff as a web producer. Among other responsibilities, Ramachandran will collaborate with editors and reporters to produce stories with forward-thinking design and execution, coordinate with photographers and illustrators, format and post articles, and keep story schedules on track.

Ramachandran comes to ProPublica Illinois as a founding member of the Stanford Computational Journalism Lab and managing editor of Bay Area local news startup Peninsula Press (in partnership with SFGate and KQED). As part of the Stanford Open Policing Project, he worked with an interdisciplinary team of journalists, researchers and social scientists to gather 130 million traffic stop records from 31 state police agencies. This summer, the team published a large-scale analysis of racial disparities in police stops, and the data was released for journalists’ use in local newsrooms across the country.

Ramachandran has also reported and written for NPR, the Marshall Project, OZY, Knight Foundation and Stanford Engineering. Before working in Silicon Valley, he was at Mashable and NBC News Digital.

“We’re thrilled to have Vignesh join the ProPublica Illinois team,” said Louise Kiernan, editor-in-chief of ProPublica Illinois. “His exemplary talent for journalism and solid design eye will be vital assets as we build our online presence.”

“This is an exciting opportunity to be a part of ProPublica’s first regional venture focused on investigative journalism that can have meaningful impact across Illinois and the country,” Ramachandran said. “I look forward to working with the stellar team of journalists across ProPublica as we launch and grow this new newsroom.”