Scott Dance is a reporter for The Washington Post covering extreme weather news and the intersections between weather, climate, society and the environment. He has reported on weather disasters from North Carolina to Mississippi to Wisconsin to California, as well as tragedies like a toxic train derailment in Ohio and a bridge collapse in Baltimore. His reporting on Hurricane Helene, as part of a Post team, was named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2025. Under the second Trump administration, he is closely tracking how changes to key federal agencies are affecting the nation’s preparedness for extreme weather and natural disasters.
Before The Post, he spent more than a decade at The Baltimore Sun, covering everything from the historic New Horizons flyby of Pluto to the arrival of Superstorm Sandy, and topics ranging from astronomy to geology to health. During the COVID-19 pandemic, he investigated nursing homes, prompting Maryland to begin publicly reporting on outbreaks, and then uncovering inconsistencies in that data. He collaborated with The New York Times on reporting that revealed a wide racial disparity in nursing home coronavirus outbreaks.
He was part of a Sun team named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for coverage of the death of Baltimore man Freddie Gray and riots that followed in 2015. And he played a supporting role in the local reporting Pulitzer the Sun’s staff received in 2020. He won the Society of Journalists’ 2023 award for best beat reporting in a small newsroom, and got second place for explanatory reporting in its 2017 contest for his series, “Power struggle.”
He was a 2020-2021 Abrams Nieman Fellowship in Local Investigative Journalism at Harvard University focused on society’s adaptation to extreme weather and climate change.
He is a native of Timonium, Md., and a graduate of the University of Maryland, College Park, with a bachelor's degree in journalism and a master's degree in public policy.