Investigative Journalist PJ Randhawa Wins Northeastern Illinois University's Highest Alumni Honor

Investigative reporter PJ Randhawa has been honoured with Northeastern Illinois University's Distinguished Alumna Award, the university's highest honour, recognising what the institution describes as a particular achievement of note, a series of such achievements, or a career of outstanding accomplishment. Randhawa received the award alongside three other alumni and one future alumna during the university's 2026 Alumni Awards celebration, capping off a journalism career that has spanned multiple American media markets and earned her seven regional Emmy Awards along the way.

Randhawa's own story is, in many respects, a distinctly diasporic one, even if it does not follow the most conventional Indian American immigration narrative. She is the daughter of immigrant parents who left India and settled in Canada, and she herself came to Northeastern Illinois University in Chicago as an international student, earning her Bachelor of Arts degree in Communication, Media and Theatre in 2008. In 2025, following a career built almost entirely within the United States media industry, Randhawa proudly became a naturalised U.S. citizen — a milestone that adds particular resonance to her return, this year, to receive her alma mater's highest alumni honour as a graduate who has now formally made America her permanent home.

Since her return to Chicago in 2023 as an Investigative Reporter for NBC 5 Responds, the station's consumer-focused investigative unit, Randhawa's reporting has produced concrete, measurable impact for viewers, with her investigations credited with helping recover more than $1 million for consumers across the Chicago area, according to a university release marking her award. That kind of direct, quantifiable consumer impact is relatively unusual to see explicitly credited within an academic honour citation, reflecting the extent to which Randhawa's investigative work has moved beyond simply reporting problems to actively resolving them for the individual consumers and viewers whose cases she has taken on.

Randhawa's broader career trajectory before returning to Chicago traces a genuinely wide-ranging path across American local television news markets, including stints as a political reporter in Columbia, South Carolina; a morning news anchor in Rapid City, South Dakota; a lead investigative reporter at KSDK in St. Louis; and the Investigative Race and Equity Reporter for KING 5 News in Seattle. That kind of multi-market career path — moving through progressively larger media markets while building an increasingly specialised investigative reporting portfolio — reflects a fairly classic trajectory within American local television journalism, though few reporters manage to accumulate the sheer volume of professional recognition Randhawa has along the way.

Her body of investigative work has earned national and regional acclaim well beyond her seven regional Emmy Awards, including recognition as a 2023 DuPont Finalist — the DuPont-Columbia Awards being among the most prestigious honours in American broadcast journalism — alongside two regional Edward R. Murrow Awards, a 2022 Crystal Mic award for Best Reporter from the Illinois News Broadcasters Association, four Society of Professional Journalists Awards for News Excellence, a 2023 National Excellence in Journalism Award from NLGJA: The Association of LGBTQ+ Journalists, an International Sikh Award for political reporting, and multiple Missouri Broadcast Awards accumulated during her earlier career stint in St. Louis.

Her time in St. Louis specifically produced some of the more consequential investigative work of her career, with her reporting during her tenure at KSDK exposing corruption within local police departments and mismanagement across city and state government departments, work that directly contributed to new laws being enacted as a result of her findings. In recognition of the tangible positive change her investigations produced for the city, St. Louis officially declared January 14, 2022, 'PJ Randhawa Day' — a rare civic honour for a working journalist, and one that speaks to just how directly her investigative reporting translated into concrete policy and accountability outcomes for the communities she covered.

Randhawa's Northeastern Illinois University connection runs deeper than this latest award alone. She previously delivered the university's December 2025 Commencement Address, a distinction the university's president, Katrina E. Bell-Jordan, framed at the time as recognition of Randhawa's commitment to ethical storytelling, advocacy, and public service — values the university explicitly identified as aligning closely with its own institutional mission. During that same commencement period, Randhawa also became a U.S. citizen and welcomed her first child with her husband, marking a genuinely eventful personal chapter that coincided almost precisely with this professional high point in her career.

Reflecting on her time as an international student at Northeastern during her Distinguished Alumna Award remarks, Randhawa described the experience of arriving on a campus filled with people from every conceivable country as genuinely formative, crediting the university's diversity and sense of community with helping her adjust to life far from her Canadian home. She specifically noted the particular pressure that comes with studying as an international student — the absence of any real fallback option to simply pause, fail, and regroup at home — as something that ultimately sharpened her determination rather than discouraging her, a lesson she has evidently carried through the subsequent two decades of an increasingly accomplished journalism career.

Randhawa's achievement also carries specific significance within the Sikh American community, given that her earlier Health and Science Mid-America Emmy Award, won for investigative reporting exposing pharmacist understaffing and its impact on prescription-error rates, made her the first Sikh-Canadian broadcast journalist to win an Emmy Award — a distinction that has periodically been noted in coverage of her career as a meaningful marker of representation within an American broadcast journalism industry where South Asian, and specifically Sikh, representation in senior investigative reporting roles has historically been limited.

Colleagues and mentors from her time at Northeastern have consistently described Randhawa in strikingly similar terms across multiple points in her career — dedicated, inquisitive, and exceptionally hardworking, with faculty specifically noting that she consistently went above and beyond in her academic pursuits even as a student. That consistency of character, tracked across mentions spanning her undergraduate years through her current status as a nationally recognised investigative journalist, suggests a genuinely stable professional identity that has translated directly into the kind of sustained, high-impact investigative work now being recognised through this latest, and by the university's own description, highest possible alumni honour.

For Northeastern Illinois University, honouring Randhawa in this way serves a dual purpose — recognising a genuinely accomplished alumna while simultaneously reinforcing the university's own institutional narrative about the kind of career outcomes an international, highly diverse student body can produce. For Randhawa herself, the award adds one more milestone to a career built, by her own account, on the simple conviction that sufficient determination can overcome even the steepest odds facing a young international student arriving in a new country with no real safety net beyond her own resolve.

Randhawa's career also offers a useful window into the broader evolution of local television investigative journalism within the United States, a format that has faced significant industry-wide financial pressure over the past decade even as its consumer-protection and government-accountability functions have, if anything, grown more valuable to local audiences increasingly underserved by shrinking local newsroom staffing levels nationally. Her sustained success within this challenged media environment reflects both individual skill and a broader institutional commitment from stations like NBC 5 Chicago to continue investing in dedicated investigative reporting capacity even as many peer stations have scaled back comparable coverage.

For younger Indian American and broader South Asian American journalists considering careers in investigative and consumer-protection reporting, Randhawa's trajectory offers a concrete, well-documented example of how a specific reporting specialty, pursued consistently across multiple market moves and career stages, can eventually produce both significant professional recognition and, perhaps more importantly, tangible public benefit for the communities such reporting ultimately serves.

As Randhawa's career continues to unfold from this latest milestone, her story stands as a genuinely instructive example of how far determination, specialised expertise, and sustained community-focused reporting can carry a first-generation immigrant journalist — from an international student navigating an unfamiliar Chicago campus to a nationally recognised investigative voice now formally recognised by the very institution where that journey began.

Her recognition also lands at a moment when the broader American local news industry continues grappling with sustainability challenges, making the Distinguished Alumna honour not just a personal milestone for Randhawa but a small, meaningful vote of institutional confidence in the enduring public value of the kind of accountability journalism she has built her career around.

For Northeastern Illinois University and for Randhawa alike, this latest honour is best understood not as a conclusion but as one more chapter in a still-unfolding story of determination rewarded.

Her award also arrives amid growing academic and industry interest in tracking the career outcomes of international students at regional public universities like Northeastern, institutions that often receive less national attention than elite private universities but that collectively educate a substantial share of the country's immigrant and first-generation professional workforce — a role Randhawa's own trajectory illustrates vividly.

Her own account of that journey — arriving alone, determined, with no fallback plan — remains, by her own telling, the throughline connecting every subsequent chapter of a career now formally honoured by the institution where it all began.

Colleagues at NBC 5 Responds have likewise credited her with raising the profile of consumer investigative reporting within the newsroom, a specialty that often receives less institutional glamour than breaking news coverage but delivers, session after session, some of the most direct and measurable benefit to ordinary viewers.