Maeve Ellis was interested in journalism before university but chose double majors in economics and history at the Faculty of Arts & Science instead. "I chose economics and history because I wanted to understand how the world works," she says.
She spent three years on staff at the Varsity and interned at the Investigative Journalism Foundation, where AI tools helped summarize information but journalists verified everything themselves. Drawing on ECO220, Introduction to Data Analysis and Applied Econometrics, and work in R and Stata, she analyzed City of Toronto beach waterfowl-count data and found a significant decline in bird populations.
Ellis has since moved from Toronto, the only city she had ever lived in, to Saskatoon, where she works as a reporter and associate producer for CBC Saskatchewan.
Reported from Where research and storytelling meet: Meet new grad Maeve Ellis, by Kate Baggott (U of T Alumni News, June 23, 2026).
More from the original reporting: alumni.utoronto.ca/news/where-research-and-storytelling-meet-meet-new-grad-maeve-ellis