RICK JERVIS is a National Correspondent for USA TODAY based in Austin, Texas, a post he’s held since 2013. He covers the border, energy, politics and large weather events. He covered Hurricane Harvey from South Texas during the storm’s landfall and from Houston during the deadly floods there.

Rick was also one of the few English-language journalists to ride out Hurricane Maria’s landfall in Puerto Rico and has returned to the island repeatedly to report on recovery efforts and the island’s growing mental health crisis. He also reports from Cuba and Mexico and travels across Texas finding enterprise stories.

Previously, he was the Gulf Coast Correspondent based in New Orleans, from 2007 to 2013, and USA TODAY’s Baghdad Bureau Chief from 2005 to 2007, where he went on more than a dozen military embeds, covered Saddam Hussein’s trial and wrote extensively about the Shiite-Sunni violence. He also covered the Israeli war against Hezbollah in Lebanon in 2006.

Rick has also worked as a reporter for the Wall Street Journal Europe in Prague, Czech Republic, the Chicago Tribune and the Miami Herald, where he was on the investigative team that won the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Journalism.

He’s Cuban-American, from Miami, and lives in Austin with his wife and two daughters.