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A subject in terrorist chatrooms, Rukmini Callimachi has been cited by U.S. lawmakers and foreign governments. WIRED magazine called her “arguably the best reporter on the most important beat in the world.” Rukmini Callimachi began covering terrorism in 2013 when locals in the city of Timbuktu, Mali led her to the building that had served as the headquarters of al-Qaeda's North African branch. On the floor and in overturned cabinets, she found thousands of pages of internal al-Qaeda documents, providing a window into the terror group's operations.

Besides the Pulitzer nomination, her series “The al-Qaeda Papers” won the Michael Kelly Award as well as two Overseas Press Club awards, making her the first reporter in the club’s over-75-year history to win both the Hal Boyle and the Bob Considine Awards in the same year. Her series, “Underwriting Jihad,” revealing how the ransoms paid by European governments had become one of the main sources of financing for al-Qaida and ISIS, won the George Polk Award. In 2016, she was awarded the inaugural “Integrity in Journalism” prize by the International Center for Journalists for her coverage of how ISIS had systematically enslaved women from the Yazidi minority. Slate magazine wrote that, “From the time ISIS rose to become the most infamous terrorist organization on Earth, no reporter has done more to explain and expose the group than The New York Times’ Rukmini Callimachi.”

Beginning her journalism career as a freelance reporter for Time magazine, Rukmini reported on the Gujarat earthquake in India in 2001. She then covered city hall at the Daily Herald in Arlington Heights, Illinois, until joining the Portland bureau of the Associated Press (AP) where she reported on New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Callimachi has covered 20 foreign countries and spent seven years in West Africa for the AP before joining the New York Times in 2014.

Born in Communist Romania, Callimachi and her family fled the country when she was 5 years old. She attended elementary school in Switzerland, before immigrating to America at the age of 10. Callimachi graduated from Dartmouth College in 1995 and earned her master’s in linguistics from Exeter College, Oxford.