Michele Steele joined ESPN as a correspondent in Dec. 2011 and contributes to all ESPN broadcasts and platforms including SportsCenter, Outside the Lines and NFL Countdown.She is one of only five national correspondents, reporting on the biggest stories in the country for ESPN. Her reporting for the network has taken her inside a criminal court to follow the murder trial of former NFL player Aaron Hernandez, to Tom Brady's suspension for Deflategate and to multiple Super Bowls and NBA championships. She is an active member of the Asian American Journalists Association at ESPN, and regularly represents the company at diversity, equity and inclusion-focused conferences and events.Steele joined ESPN with experience anchoring and reporting for Bloomberg Television, where she originated the role of the network’s first sports reporter with a focus on the business of the NFL, NBA, MLB and the NHL. Prior to that at Bloomberg, she was deployed as a correspondent covering the U.S. economy. She anchored a morning business newscast that was broadcast to over 120 affiliates nationwide. Before working at Bloomberg, she spent time at Forbes where she was a regular contributor to business programming on Fox News. Her journalism career began in Chicago for the nationally syndicated business television show First Business, where she pitched, secured funding and traveled to India to report a 4-part series on Asia’s third-largest economy. She earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in economics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a Master of Science in journalism with a focus on broadcast media from Columbia University. A native of Chicago, she is a member of the Asian American Journalists Association, the Alliance Francaise and the Young Professionals group of the Michael J Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research. She credits her dad for her sense of humor and for, above all, teaching her the importance of rooting for the underdog.