Dan Mihalopoulos

Dan is an investigative reporter on WBEZ’s Government & Politics Team. Since joining the station in 2018, Dan has won three National Edward R. Murrow Awards, including the 2022 investigative reporting prize, for a series of stories on sexual abuse of lifeguards at Chicago’s beaches and pools. The “Buried Secrets” series prompted criminal charges, reforms and the resignations of the Park District’s chief executive and board president. Those stories also won first prize in the Richard H. Driehaus Foundation Awards for Investigative Reporting.

Dan is a three-time winner of the Chicago Headline Club’s Watchdog Award for Excellence in Public Interest Reporting and was awarded the Headline Club’s 2018 Anne Keegan Award for his feature stories about immigrants. His work also earned first prize for investigative reporting in the Education Writers Association’s national awards in 2014. 

Dan joined WBEZ from the Chicago Sun-Times. His investigations for the newspaper’s “Watchdogs” team led to the resignation of a Chicago Public Schools CEO and a federal fraud case against the leader of the state’s largest charter-school network. Dan previously was a reporter for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the Chicago News Cooperative (Chicago section of the New York Times) and the Chicago Tribune, where he covered the City Hall beat, the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in New York and the 2004 Summer Olympics in Athens.

Dan was born in Chicago and graduated from Maine West High School in Des Plaines and the University of Missouri School of Journalism. His first language was Greek and he is fluent in Spanish.