When Raj Mankad (Weinberg ’99) arrived to Northwestern as a freshman in the Honors Program in Medical Education — a now-discontinued seven-year pathway admitting undergraduates simultaneously into Feinberg School of Medicine — he expected to follow a straight track toward becoming a doctor. Instead, that path veered sharply.
Now the deputy opinion editor at the Houston Chronicle, Mankad was part of a four-person team that won the 2025 Pulitzer Prize in Editorial Writing for a series titled “Dangerous Crossings” about how stalled freight trains were endangering students by blocking their paths to school. When faced with intersections blocked for hours, students often resorted to climbing under or squeezing between train cars.
The six-part 2024 series marks the Chronicle’s third-ever Pulitzer Prize. In August, following publication, the Texas Legislature dedicated $250 million in grants statewide, but Mankad said there’s still more work to be done.
The Prize-winning team was composed of Mankad, who served as an editor and writer, Leah Binkovitz, the writer who pitched the series, reported and wrote editorials, Sharon Steinmann, an opinion videographer who contributed reporting and video editorials and Lisa Falkenberg, a writer and the editor who oversaw the project.
The Daily spoke with Mankad about his NU experience, career journey and the work that earned him a Pulitzer Prize.
This interview has been lightly edited for brevity and clarity.
The Daily: Can you tell me about your time at NU and how it shaped your career as a journalist?
Mankad: I signed up for all kinds of clubs, everything possible, because I just wanted to sample everything … I went to the recruitment meeting for new students for The Daily Northwestern, and the student who was running the meeting was like, ‘Well, this is The Daily Northwestern, and we have a school of journalism, so you shouldn’t expect to do anything other than maybe copy edit or do photo research for at least a year’ … So I never went back … One of the things I signed up to do was DJ at WNUR …
There were things happening in the background, or sort of on the side, that I was adjacent to that exposed me to Medill and the excellence there, and I guess that was influencing me. But as you can see, I didn’t study journalism at Northwestern and every day of my life now as a journalist, I wish I had.
The Daily: Can you walk me through your career path after you decided to switch into journalism?
Mankad: When I left medical school, I was more in a state of confusion. I knew I wanted to do something that involved writing, publishing or storytelling, and I knew that I wanted to be bound up in a community.
I ended up getting a philosophy degree from Northwestern, and Kharis Publishing had a couple of different imprints. One of them was a philosophy books imprint, and so they hired me to work a few hours a week. That was my first job after quitting medical school, and then I got other publishing jobs after that, like as an assistant editor at this coffee table book imprint of Penguin in New York … Then I went to Houston to do this creative writing program, so I still was thinking I was going to write short stories and maybe poetry. When I was at the University of Houston’s creative writing program, there were some nonfiction teachers and they were basically long-form journalists. That’s where I started learning about what a fact really is, so I guess I caught the nonfiction bug.
I had spent four or five months in India working for a feminist non-governmental organization, but this job came up at Rice University to work as an assistant editor at an academic journal called Feminist Economics … After I was at an architecture publication, my first job at the Chronicle and my first job in a mainstream journalism publication was on the Opinion Team as the op-ed editor.
The Daily: You were part of a group that won the 2025 Pulitzer Prize in Editorial Writing for a series on Houston students having to cross dangerous Union Pacific railroads on their way to school. Can you tell me how that idea first surfaced in the Chronicle’s newsroom and what your role in writing it was?
Mankad: One of our editorial writers, Leah Binkovitz — after reading some news coverage from our colleague, Dug Begley, about the impact of our freight lines on the city and on neighborhoods — pitched an editorial about it … After two years of work on this project, and it was almost the end of the school year, we were like … ‘I know we can make it better, but let’s get something out before the end of the school year,’ and that piece got a huge amount of traction. We were basically warning that something terrible would happen. It was a tragedy waiting to happen.
A few months later, a young man, Sergio Rodriguez, was killed at a crossing while trying to get to school at Milby High School, which is right next to one of these Union Pacific rail lines … I was talking to people on the street, business owners and then later, classmates. Sharon (Steinmann) and I were texting Lisa Falkenberg and I was basically writing out the bones of a story by text. She took that raw material and wrote our first editorial responding to that tragedy, and it was published within a few hours of it happening. It was informed by years of research, and then we followed up with several more pieces.
The Daily: I’m curious about how you balanced the editorial writing in this series with the reporting. Can you tell me a bit more about that?
Mankad: If you’re doing it right, in order to make a judgment about some topic, controversy (or) problem bedeviling our community, it takes a whole extra layer of inquiry because we’re not just presenting different sides and then leaving it to the reader to make their own judgments, we’re rendering an institutional claim … With the rail pieces that won the Pulitzer, we put in that time in advance, so we were able to write very much in the news cycle with a clarity that was needed and with urgency, but we had worked to inform ourselves to be able to get to that place.
The Daily: What was the first thing that went through your mind when you learned that your team had won the Pulitzer?
Mankad: I shared my imposter syndrome. I think I shared that that first time I went to The Daily Northwestern meeting, I felt like I didn’t belong, and I was completely intimidated, and I still feel that way now, like, ‘What am I even doing here? I’m not a journalist. I’m a poet and fiction writer masquerading as one’ …
When it got announced, my colleague, Leah, burst into tears because we were thinking about that family … We carry a lot of secondary trauma with our work. I know a lot of journalists do, but we deliberately do not compartmentalize. We come into work and we let our feelings flow, we cry together, we yell together and we bang our fists on the table together. Even at school today, the streets outside of it are incredibly dangerous. And it’s not just the rail line, it’s the entire configuration of the streets, the total disregard for the public realm. I actually spent my career working on that, and I can’t say it’s better than when I started.
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