Lydia Sidhom

About Lydia Sidhom

Hello! I’m a data reporter at The Washington Post through the paper’s inaugural two-year data reporting fellowship. I graduated from UC Berkeley with degrees in Data Science and Political Science.Bay Area raised, I have worked as a data reporting intern at the San Francisco Chronicle, a Dow Jones News Fund reporting intern at Bay City News, and a data reporter and editor at UC Berkeley’s independent, student-run newspaper The Daily Californian.Outside of the newsroom, I have also helped build data ethics curriculum at UC Berkeley. As a College of Data Science, Computing, and Society Human Contexts and Ethics curriculum developer, I worked on integrating ethical considerations into large core undergraduate data science courses, including Data 8 and Data 100. I also worked as an independent course developer creating a problem set and labs for the undergraduate legal studies course Data, Prediction, and Law. I was a speaker at the Mozilla Responsible Computing Education Program at Northeastern University, where I delivered a talk on my work developing data ethics pedagogical tools.I’m interested in the role of data in the U.S. criminal legal system. I worked on a project at UC Berkeley’s Goldman School of Public Policy’s Possibility Lab that helped expedite criminal case resentencing in California through building a data automation tool that sped up the case review process. The project was awarded the Microsoft Catalyst Grant, and the tool is now being used in 12 District Attorney offices across the state. I also worked as a data scientist for the U.S. Department of Justice Bureau of Prisons to investigate the possibility of using re-conviction instead of re-arrest as a proxy for a defendant recommitting a crime in a federal recidivism algorithm.

Experience

1. Data Reporter

   The Washington Post

   Aug 2025 — Present · Washington, DC, US

Education

• University of California, Berkeley

  Bachelor's degree, Data Science & Political Science

• Sciences Po

  Exchange semester