Ian Urbina is an investigative reporter based in Washington. His most recent series, The Outlaw Ocean, chronicles a diversity of crimes offshore, including the killing of stowaways, sea slavery, intentional dumping, illegal fishing, the stealing of ships, gun running, stranding of crews, and murder with impunity. He has reported from Africa, Asia, Europe, South America and the Middle East, much of that time spent on fishing ships.

Mr. Urbina has also written extensively on criminal justice issues, including stories about the use of prisoners for pharmaceutical experiments, immigrant detainees working unpaid, solitary confinement in immigration detention facilities, and the dependence of the U.S. Defense Department on prison labor. Several of his stories have been made into feature films.

In 2008, Mr. Urbina was a member of the team of reporters that broke the story about then-Gov. Eliot Spitzer of New York and his use of prostitutes, a series of stories for which The New York Times won a Pulitzer in 2009. In 2016, he won a Polk Award for the Outlaw Ocean series and several other awards for a series called Drilling Down, about fracking.

Before joining The Times in 2003, Mr. Urbina was in a doctoral program in history and anthropology at the University of Chicago, where he specialized on Cuba.