My grandfather first visited Corpus Christi, Texas, in the late 1960s, and he loved the smell of refineries by the sea, which reminded him of childhood in Suez, Egypt. He’d just left the homeland a few years before with my grandmother and my dad when he decided Texas would be the family’s new home.

My mother was born to a Canadian flight attendant and a Lake Michigan fisherman of Scandinavian and Hungarian stock.

In the 1980s, my parents met at the University of Texas at Austin. I was born in Houston in 1991, the first of four brothers. Our family loved to go camping (all us boys are proud Eagle Scouts).

My dreams as a child were to be a NASA engineer (but I wasn’t great at math), then to major in music (but I didn’t practice enough). After joining my high school yearbook team as a photographer, I decided my future lay in reporting.

Back then, Spanish was something everyone studied at public schools in Texas, a bilingual state. I started at age 13 but didn’t imagine how the language would change my life or the worlds it would open up. When the Northwest Austin Rotary Club sent me on a yearlong student exchange to Argentina before college, I had a chance to attain fluency.

At the University of Texas at Austin I learned Latin American studies and journalism. In a reporting class I met my future wife end eternal editor, Pu Ying Huang. As partners we began to pursue careers in publishing.

 
 

My Resumé:

2009: Eagle Scout, Boys Scouts of America

2009-2010: Rotary Youth Exchange in Córdoba, Argentina

2010-2014: University of Texas at Austin, journalism and Latin American studies

2012: AIESEC Global Internship Program in Almaty, Kazakhstan (January-May)

2015-2017: Houston Chronicle reporter

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  • Web desk

  • Politics desk (Ted Cruz presidential campaign and the 2016 election)

  • Business desk (industrial real estate and the construction industry)

2017-2020: Freelance correspondent in Colombia

2020-2022: Analyst for Sibylline LLC, embedded at Meta (Facebook) on Global Security, Intelligence & Investigations, covering criminal orgs in Latin America

2022: Freelance reporter in Texas

2022-present: Texas correspondent for Inside Climate News

A short video about me produced by the American Society of Civil Engineers:

Dylan Baddour is the winner of ASCE's 2017 Excellence in Journalism Award for his coverage of of Houston's aging flood control infrastructure.

 

Photo album