40th Anniversary Celebration

Mary-Rose Abraham is an independent multimedia journalist based in Bangalore, India. Her stories have been featured in BBC News, National Geographic, The Guardian, Deutsche Welle, Earth Island Journal, and Vice. She is the co-creator and co-host of “Scrolls & Leaves,” a world history, science and cultures podcast that has been featured by Spotify. Before moving to India, she was a staff producer at ABC News in New York, reported and produced for NPR, and was a researcher at NBC News. Abraham grew up in Los Angeles and has an undergraduate degree in Biology from UCLA and master’s degree (with honors) in Journalism from Columbia University.

Pam Belluck is a New York Times staff writer whose honors include a Pulitzer Prize and the Victor Cohn Prize for Excellence in Medical Science Reporting. Her work has been chosen for The Best American Science Writing. Her book, “Island Practice,” about an unusual doctor, is in development for a TV series.

Charles M. Blow is an Op-Ed columnist at The New York Times, where his column appears on Mondays and Thursdays. Mr. Blow’s columns tackle hot-button issues such as social justice, racial equality, presidential politics, police violence, gun control, and the Black Lives Matter Movement.
Mr. Blow is also a CNN commentator and was a Presidential Visiting Professor at Yale, where he taught a seminar on media and politics.
Mr. Blow is the author of the critically acclaimed New York Times best-selling memoir, Fire Shut Up in My Bones. The book won a Lambda Literary Award and the Sperber Prize and made multiple prominent lists of best books published in 2014. People Magazine called it “searing and unforgettable.” His second book, The Devil You Know: A Black Power Manifesto, was named a “most anticipated book” by the San Francisco Chronicle, O, the Oprah Magazine, Time Out, Town and Country, and Lithub.
Mr. Blow joined The New York Times in 1994 as a graphics editor and quickly became the paper’s graphics director, a position he held for nine years. In that role, he led The Times to a best of show award from the Society for News Design for The Times’ information graphics coverage of 9/11, the first time the award had been given for graphics coverage. He also led the paper to its first two best of show awards from the Malofiej Infographics World Summit for work that included coverage of the Iraq war. He then went on to become the paper’s design director for news before leaving in 2006 to become the art director of National Geographic Magazine. Before coming to The Times, Mr. Blow had worked at The Detroit News.
He graduated magna cum laude from Grambling State University in Louisiana, where he received a B.A. in mass communications, and he holds an honorary doctorate from Massachusetts College of Art and Design in Boston. He lives in Brooklyn and has three children.

Deborah Blum is a Pulitzer-prizewinning American science journalist, columnist, and author of six books, including The Poison Squad (2018), and The Poisoner’s Handbook (2010). She is a former president of the National Association of Science Writers, was a member of the governing board of the World Federation of Science Writers, and currently serves on the board of advisors of the Council for the Advancement of Science Writing. In 2015, Blum was selected as the fourth director of the Knight Science Journalism Program at MIT and that same year became founding publisher of Undark.

Alan Goodman, professor of biological anthropology at Hampshire College, teaches and writes on the health and nutritional consequences of poverty, inequality and racism. He previously served as Hampshire’s Vice President for Academic Affairs and Dean of Faculty. Goodman is a past President of the American Anthropological Association and co-directs its public education project on race (understandingrace.org). He has written over one hundred articles and is the editor or author of a variety of books including “Building a New Biocultural Synthesis,” “Nutritional Anthropology, Race: Are We So Different?” and most recently, “Racism, Not Race” (with Joseph Graves).

Akin Jimoh Knight Fellow MIT (’01), the Chief Editor of Nature Africa, was a Mentor/Anglophone Africa Coordinator (‘06–‘13) WFSJ Science Journalism Cooperation (SjCOOP) Project. The Bell Fellow in Population and Development Studies Harvard (‘95/’96) has been involved in science journalism training and mentoring for over two decades.

Paul A. Lombardo, PhD, JD, Regents’ Professor and Bobby Lee Cook Professor of Law, is a lawyer/historian at the Georgia State University College of Law in Atlanta, who is best known for his work on the legal history of the American eugenics movement. His books include: Three Generations, No Imbeciles: Eugenics, the Supreme Court and Buck v. Bell (2008, updated edition, 2022), & A Century of Eugenics in America: From the Indiana Experiment to the Human Genome Era (2011). He is currently studying how the politics of birth control, abortion and eugenics intersected during the early 20th Century.
From 1985-1990, Lombardo practiced law in California. From 1990 until 2006, he served on the faculty of the Schools of Law and Medicine at the University of Virginia, from which he received both his PhD and JD degrees.

Jyoti Madhusoodanan is an independent journalist based in Portland, Oregon. She covers the life sciences, STEM careers, health and health disparities for Nature, Scientific American, The New York Times and other outlets. Her reporting on clinical trials and health inequities has received support from the Association of Health Care Journalists and the Alicia Patterson Foundation. Her 2020 Knight Science Journalism fellowship project focused on how the racialization of biomedical research has impacted medical care for people of color.

Ehsan Masood is a senior editor at Nature. He taught science policy at Imperial College London for a decade and has made documentaries for the BBC and written several books including GDP: The World’s Most Powerful Formula and Why it Must Now Change and Science and Islam: A History. He was a KSJ Fellow in 2017/18.

Victor K. McElheny is the founding director of the Knight Science Journalism Program, and led the program from 1983 to 1998. He is a longtime science writer who worked for The Charlotte Observer, Science magazine, The Boston Globe and The New York Times, reporting on such topics as science in Antarctica and Europe, the Apollo lunar landing program and the green revolution in Asia. At The Times during the 1970s, he founded one of the first technology columns in American newspapers.

Thiago Medaglia: Thiago Medaglia is a Brazilian science journalist, a writer, and the founder of Ambiental Media (https://ambiental.media/en), a news startup that transforms science into compelling and accessible journalism. A former editor of National Geographic Brazil magazine, he was a fellow in the Knight Science Journalism Program at MIT in 2020, and holds a master’s degree in History of Science from Harvard.

Melissa Nobles is MIT’s Chancellor and the Class of 1922 professor of political science. As Chancellor, she oversees more than 60 interconnected offices that support students’ academic success, cultivate intellectual and personal growth, and foster community and wellbeing.
Chancellor Nobles served as the Kenan Sahin Dean of the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences from 2015 to 2021 and the head of the Department of Political Science from 2013 to 2015.

C. Brandon Ogbunu is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Yale University, and an External Professor at the Santa Fe institute. He is a computational biologist whose research investigates complex problems in epidemiology, biomedicine, genetics, and evolution. In addition, he runs a parallel research program at the intersection of science, society, and culture. In this capacity, he writes, gives public lectures, and creates media of various kinds.

Agustín Rayo is a philosophy professor at MIT. His research is at the intersection of the philosophy of logic and the philosophy of language. Rayo has done work on understanding the relationship between our language and the world it represents, on clarifying certain connections between logic and mathematics, and on investigating the limits of communicable thought. He is currently serving as Dean of the MIT School of Humanities Arts, and Social Sciences.

Rensberger directed the Knight Fellowships from 1998 to 2008. Since 1966 he has been a science journalist, mainly with The New York Times and The Washington Post; head writer of “3-2-1 Contact!,” a science show for kids; a freelance writer; and senior editor of “Science 80,” a monthly magazine.

Mary Roach: Mary Roach is the author of the New York Times bestsellers “Stiff”, “Spook”, “Bonk”, “Gulp”, “Grunt”, and “Packing for Mars”. Her new book “Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law,” debuted in September 2021. Mary has written for National Geographic, Wired, and The New York Times Magazine, among others, and her TED talk made the TED 20 Most Watched list. She has been a guest editor for Best American Science and Nature Writing, a finalist for the Royal Society’s Winton Prize, and a winner of the American Engineering Societies’ journalism award, in a category for which, let’s be honest, she was the sole entrant. More at www.maryroach.net

Angela Saini is a British journalist based in New York and the author of four books, including Superior: The Return of Race Science, which was a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize and Inferior: How Science Got Women Wrong, which has been translated into fourteen languages. Her latest book The Patriarchs, on the origins of patriarchy, was hailed as a highlight for 2023 by the Financial Times, The Guardian and Publishers Weekly. Angela has a Masters in Engineering from the University of Oxford and in 2022 was a Logan Nonfiction Fellow in New York and a resident scholar at the Humboldt Foundation in Berlin. She has delivered distinguished lectures and keynotes at Oxford, Yale, Princeton and CERN in Geneva.

Ashley Smart is the associate director of the Knight Science Journalism Program at MIT and a senior editor at Undark magazine. He previously spent eight years as an editor and reporter at Physics Today magazine and cofounded the science news blog HBSciU. Ashley was a 2015-16 Knight Science Journalism fellow and is a member of the advisory board of the Council for the Advancement of Science Writing. Ashley has a PhD in Chemical and Biological Engineering from Northwestern University, in Evanston, IL.

Margaret Sullivan: Margaret Sullivan is a groundbreaking journalist and award-winning media critic. After starting her career as a summer intern at her hometown daily, The Buffalo News, she rose through the ranks to become its first woman editor. She led that 200-member newsroom for 13 years before being named the first woman public editor of The New York Times. She has been a columnist for the Washington Post and now, for the Guardian US. The mother of a grown son and daughter, she has written two books, served on the Pulitzer Prize board, taught journalism at Columbia University and CUNY, and is a visiting professor at Duke University. She lives in New York City.

Tom Zeller Jr. has spent two decades covering technology, energy policy, poverty, and the environment for a variety of national and international publications, including 12 years as a staff writer and editor at The New York Times. Tom is a former grantee of the International Reporting Project, and he was selected as a Knight Science Journalism Fellow in 2013. He joined the KSJ program as the founding editor of Undark in 2015.