Neema Roshania Patel, a Washington Post editor, died on Monday at the age of 35 following a fight with gastric cancer.
Roshania Patel joined the Washington Post in 2016 as a digital editor before contributing to the paper’s successful podcast “The Lily,” which focuses on women’s and gender issues.
While working on the podcast, Roshania Patel spearheaded initiatives including “Anxiety Chronicles,” which tracks mental health challenges, and “The Jessicas,” a months-long project that follows the lives of women born with the most common name from 1989 to date.
Roshania Patel resigned her role as top editor at the Lily in 2009 to join the paper’s Next Generation program, which intended to broaden WaPo’s readership to younger populations.
“Younger audiences want to see their experiences and the experiences of their peers reflected in the journalism they consume,” she wrote in an op-ed to the Poynter Institute about diversifying sources.
“They want to see how policy affects the lives of everyday people. And they want to feel personally connected to what they read. Diverse sourcing makes us more trustworthy arbiters of the news.”
Roshania Patel was born in 1987 in Maplewood, New Jersey to immigrant parents. After working for her high school newspaper, she earned a journalism degree from Rutgers University in 2009.
Prior to joining the Washington Post, the married mother of one served as a community editor at NPR member station WHYY in Philadelphia.