Abby Pender is a data-driven investigative reporter covering politics, economics and technology.

Her latest work has been referenced in the Wall Street Journal and she has accumulated over 40,000 reads on her stories. She is an assistant university editor at The Daily Tar Heel and a journalism major at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with minors in data science and Spanish. Abby is interested in the intersection of investigative and data-driven reporting. This summer, she will be shadowing the News & Observer's investigative team while taking summer classes. After graduating in 2025, Abby plans to cover large-scale political and economic issues through data calculation in the international media world.