Jeffrey Guo joins Financial Staff

Announcement from National Economy and Business Editor Greg Schneider, Deputy Business Editor David Cho and Economic Policy Correspondent Jim Tankersley:

We’re excited to announce that Jeffrey Guo will be joining the Financial section’s new online data and storytelling project.

Jeff grew up in the Maryland suburbs and has degrees in math and economics from MIT. While he earned a statistically improbable grade point average in those numbers-heavy subjects, Jeff wasn’t satisfied studying equations and formulas. He felt his training gave him the tools to explain the world to others. So in addition to becoming editor-in-chief of the MIT student newspaper, he taught himself programming languages and learned to create charts and graphics.

He had a yearlong fellowship as a reporter and researcher at the New Republic, where he wrote about education and economics, and he has worked as a freelance fact-checker. Now Jeff is brimming with ideas for creating online visualizations — he’s found an obscure set of data about fruit consumption that tells the evolution of the American diet, for instance, and other statistics that track the spread of HIV into the Deep South.

We think Jeff will supply a regular diet of surprise and insight to the data/storytelling venture led by Jim Tankersley, and we hope you’ll join us in welcoming him to the Post.