Thompson is an award-winning investigative correspondent for NPR. Before joining NPR in 2019, she spent 22 years covering law enforcement, political corruption and the White House for The Washington Post, and was part of teams that won the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting in 2002 and 2016. She was the reporting coach on the NPR podcast "No Compromise," which won the Pulitzer Prize for Audio Reporting in 2021. She served as a Pulitzer Prize juror for investigative reporting in 2022 and chaired the jury in 2023. She is a 2026 SPJ-DC Hall of Fame inductee and is the recipient of more than 40 journalism awards. Her first book, Forgotten Souls: The Search for the Lost Tuskegee Airmen, was released earlier this year.