Eliza Partika

Alumni

Eliza currently works as a writer for the UC Berkeley School of Public Health communications team, where she enjoys interviewing sources working on fascinating projects, like her recent story on sisters and BPH students Nazineen Kandahari and Nilufar Kayhani, who started a health education initiative to address health disparities in the Bay area Afghan refugee community. The story was was featured on The Berkeley Wire on August 13, 2021, and on NPR’s Our Body Politic. It was one of Berkeley Public Health’s most widely shared stories in years.

From August 2019 through the start of the pandemic, Eliza worked for the UC Irvine Office of Strategic Communications & Public Affairs writing impact stories on student and faculty research in the sciences – everything from interdisciplinary neuroscience advancements, stem cell and Alzheimer’s research to AI predicting the behavior of wildfires and the ways in which humans process and artistically represent death through the objects once belonging to loved ones.

Through July 2021, she interned with KQED as a data research assistant for the California Reporting Project, reading, annotating, and analyzing police misconduct records. She assisted in fact-checking and copy editing KQED’s breaking story on the Bakersfield Police Department’s unaccountability for breaking the bones of  31 people over four months.

A segment she reported and mixed for KALW Radio aired in March 2021:  “Beautiful, Unexpected: Children’s Choir Builds Confidence Despite Virtual Rehearsals”

With Bay News Rising, she looked into public restroom access for Berkeley, San Francisco and Oakland’s unhoused population.

Most recently, she contributed to an open source investigation with Reveal, the Human Rights Center and the school of journalism’s Investigative Reporting Program  to create  an hour-long radio piece “A Strike at the Heart of Roe”, which uncovered how anti-abortion groups clandestinely introduced the idea of heartbeat laws, and how the idea of a “heartbeat” – now so intrinsic in our culture – developed from a fringe idea to getting enforced in Texas.

Eliza has traveled on experiential education trips to Israel and the Palestinian Territories with the Rose Project’s Fact Finders Learning Mission and the Olive Tree Initiative, where she heard personal experiences of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from diplomats, journalists, and citizens on the ground.  She is interested in examining and correcting the media’s misrepresentation of communities in conflict and publishing narratives that will reveal the realities of these communities. She is also interested in the politics behind trans-generational trauma, as well as the ability of art to heal generational trauma that comes from prolonged and intractable conflicts. She is working towards a career as a foreign correspondent.

She is studying multimedia at the Graduate School of Journalism, where she is interested in exploring the intersections between data and long-form interactive storytelling.

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Public health, housing and food insecurity, mental health, music and mental health, refugees and diaspora communities