Journalist and editor Scott Allen ’83 gave a talk last night at Bowdoin on the role of “investigative journalism in democracy.” The event was sponsored by the Tom Cassidy Lecture Fund.

Allen is the current editor of The Spotlight Team at The Boston Globe, an investigative reporting team that exposed the sexual abuse scandal in the Catholic Church in 2001, as portrayed in the recent Oscar best picture, Spotlight. Allen helped lead the Globe’s coverage of the Boston Marathon bombings and ensuing manhunt, coverage that earned a 2014 Pulitzer Prize. He previously served as the Globe’s health and science editor and as the newspaper’s lead environmental writer. He also has written extensively on government corruption, resulting in numerous criminal convictions.

A journalist for 32 years, Allen has taught science journalism to graduate students at Boston University and served as a Knight Science Journalism Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Photos by Fred Field