Christine Gralow is a journalist and educator.

After graduating from U.C. Berkeley with a master’s degree in journalism and completing a summer fellowship with Bloomberg News in Singapore, Christine Gralow made a career detour with the NYC Teaching Fellows program. Her early success teaching and learning from students with autism led to a 20-year career in the field.

While working at high schools in the South Bronx, Gralow ran a humorous teacher blog that was recognized as a Yahoo! blog of the day. This led to an invitation to blog about autism and education for The New York Times, where her articles ranked among the top ten most read.

While teaching in Hawai’i, Gralow saw a strong need for independent investigative journalism in the state and founded the local news nonprofit Meanwhile in Hawai’i. Her research on an alleged cult in her community led to an investigative series on financial and political corruption surrounding her then U.S. Rep., current Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard. Gralow’s independent 2017 investigative series on the Science of Identity Foundation and the Gabbard family’s deep involvement has been repeatedly acknowledged in national press.

Since Gabbard’s nomination and confirmation as U.S. spy chief, there has been strong national interest in Gralow’s unique independent journalism project. In December 2024, she authored a two-part series for SpyTalk, an intelligence community publication. Her distinctive narrative journalism style once again captured readers, and her articles were among the publication’s top three most read of the year. In January 2025, a front page Wall Street Journal article detailed how Gabbard and the Science of Identity Foundation paid a shady D.C. publicist to try to smear Gralow and suppress her work. This only made Gralow dig deeper.

Although she still privately consults as an autism specialist, Gralow has decided that now is a crucial time in the U.S. to focus professionally on press freedom, pro-democracy organizing, and countering divisive disinformation. In addition to her education and journalism work, Gralow has a strong background in social justice and community organizing, having majored in community studies at U.C. Santa Cruz, with a focus on police and criminal justice reform. She currently works contractually as a legal researcher in the criminal defense field and volunteers as a regional organizer for a progressive U.S. Senate campaign in Texas.