Hey, I'm Kat de Jesus Chua.

I'm a data scientist, writer, and civic data transparency activist based in Chicago.

I currently cover local government meetings as part of City Bureau's Documenters network. You can find notes I've written here.

I was a 2025 Investigative Reporters and Editors Gary Marx Scholarship winner, recognized for my work building Python pipelines to preserve public data for the Data Liberation Project.

Previously, I worked as a Data Scientist at Warner Bros. Discovery, specializing in Natural Language Processing and applied machine learning for media content. I graduated in 2020 with a B.A. in Data Science from the University of California, Berkeley. Find my resume here.

Catching up on the news with a fellow citizen in Carmel, Indiana
He was quite unmoved by my nonsense. Solid guy.

Chicago Documenters

Covering Chicago Government Meetings

As a Documenter, I attend and take notes on Chicago's public meetings.

These notes support City Bureau's reporting and provide Chicagoans a record of what happens in local government meetings, neighborhood councils, and courthouses in their city.

Data Liberation Project

Preserving Public Datasets

Vast quantities of government data exist in inaccessible, difficult-to-analyze formats. This data is also vulnerable to removal or manipulation by bad actors.

As a volunteer, I build webscraping and data cleansing pipelines to preserve this data for the public good.
Visit GitHub

Another Chicago Magazine

Reviewing Fiction Submissions

I review short story submissions for Another Chicago Magazine, recommending pieces for publication.

Previously, I served as a Fiction Reader for Same Faces Collective, where I evaluated submissions and nominated outstanding work for the 2025 Pushcart Prize.

More Projects

MuckRock

TSA Complaint Data Disappeared

At the start of Trump's second term, the TSA removed years of complaints reports from its website.

I covered the removal and how Data Liberation Project's archive of TSA complaints data can fill the gap.