Based in North Carolina, Cowell has collaborated with The Independent Weekly in Durham, N.C. on award-winning investigative projects involving environmental injustices in African-American communities. Her story “The Waste Land” received the Society for Professional Journalists’ 2011 Sigma Delta Chi Award in the category of investigative reporting for a non-daily publication. Cowell’s stories have been published in The News and Observer, GRIT Magazine, Slate.com, among others, and at the Institute for Southern Studies. As an independent journalist, she was awarded a George Polk investigative grant to pursue her reporting. Cowell’s appointment is through the Schuster Institute-Fund for Investigative Journalism Fellowship.