David Fallis

About David Fallis

David S. Fallis is the Investigations Editor for The Washington Post. Fallis joined the Post in as an investigative reporter and in 2014 became deputy editor of the Investigative Unit. In 2025, he took over the unit.Most recently, he oversaw The Post’s 2024 investigation into Indian Boarding schools, revealing the consequences of the 150-year attempt by the federal government to force assimilation on Native Americans. In 2023, he led and co-edited The Collection, an investigation that revealed more than 250 human brains stored in a Smithsonian storage unit. One of the stories, “Searching for Maura,” was told as an illustration and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Illustrated Reporting and Commentary. In 2022, he led and co-edited the investigation on Broken Doors, a six-part podcast that exposed the lack of accountability for no-knock warrants and, which was named a Pulitzer Prize finalist for Audio. In 2020 he co-edited The Post’s first investigative podcast, Canary, a seven-part series which revealed the intertwining stories of two women who suffered sexual assaults decades apart. The podcast won Edward R. Murrow and Robert F. Kennedy awards. In 2019, Fallis edited The Afghanistan Papers, a six-part investigation based on a secret trove of documents that revealed officials in three administrations lied about the 18-year military campaign. The project won a George Polk Award for Military Reporting, the Scripps Howard Award for Investigative Reporting and the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award. That same year he was co-editor on The Opioid Files, an investigation that analyzed a confidential government database to reveal that drug companies flooded the country with 76 billion pills as overdose deaths climbed. It was a finalist for the Pulitzer Public Service Award. In 2018, He has also led a series that mapped homicides in 50 of America’s major cities and revealed clusters of unsolved killings disproportionately in communities of color, which was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for Explanatory Reporting. In 2015, he helped lead and edit a team of journalists that identified and analyzed nearly fatal shootings by police nationwide. For that year-long work, The Post was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting. In 2002, he was part of a reporting team that was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for an investigation of shootings and in-custody deaths involving Prince George’s County police. Before joining The Post in he worked at the Tulsa World. His career began at the now-defunct Tulsa Tribune.

Experience

1. Investigations Editor

   The Washington Post

   Feb 2025 — Present

Education

• University of Oklahoma

  Bachelor of Arts, Journalism

  1982 — 1988