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Sandhya Dirks

Sandhya Dirks arrived in Iowa in January of 2012 as a general assignment reporter. Since coming to Des Moines she has covered the Statehouse and traveled across Iowa to bring back stories for IPR. Sandhya was previously a reporter at KALW in San Francisco, covering education and criminal justice issues. Her work was awarded a SPJ Sigma Delta Chi and a regional Edward R. Murrow award.

Most recently, Sandhya earned her Master of Science from Columbia Journalism School in New York. Her master’s project was an investigative documentary about international adoption for which she was awarded the Pasty Preston Pulitzer Documentary Fellowship.

Sandhya’s favorite public radio program is Radiolab.

  • In Iowa, it takes just 100 signatures to petition for a temporary "satellite" voting station. Campaigns are establishing the pop-up sites at grocery stores and college campuses to encourage early voting at convenient times and locations.
  • The Midwest is home to the largest collection of grottoes, or man-made caves, in the world. And the mother of them all — encrusted in $6 million worth of semiprecious stones — is in West Bend, Iowa, the life's work of a priest after he survived pneumonia. It turns 100 this weekend.
  • China vice President Xi Jinping first encountered America through the eyes of Iowans. In 1985, he was just a mid-level Communist Party official on an exchange trip to the Hawkeye State. At a formal dinner Wednesday night, he fondly remembered his initial visit to America.