In an announcement published this morning by MIT News, the Knight Science Journalism program released the names of the 10 journalists selected for its 33rd class of fellows.
The new Knight Fellows will audit courses at MIT and Harvard, visit top New England science destinations, and pursue individual media projects from August 2015 to May 2016.
As a member of the KSJ selection committee, which reviewed a record number of applications for the nine-month fellowships (150 in all), I can assure you that the competition was fierce, and that the selected journalists represent some of the sharpest and most passionate and talented journalists that the world of science, technology health, environmental reporting has to offer.
They’ll be the first group of Knight Fellows led by incoming KSJ director Deborah Blum, and I know they’re going to do great things here at MIT and in their post-KSJ futures. It was a privilege to be involved in their selection.
The new Knight Fellows are:
Alicia Chang (@sciwrialicia), the Los Angeles-based science writer for The Associated Press. She previously worked in the news cooperative’s bureaus in Detroit; Columbia, South Carolina; and Albany, New York. She is the 2009 recipient of the Evert Clark/Seth Payne Award, an annual prize for young science journalists. She is a member of the National Association of Science Writers and the Association of Health Care Journalists. Outside the newsroom, she has taught reporting and writing at the University of Southern California.
Sasha Chapman (@sashachapman), a senior editor at The Walrus, Canada’s most decorated magazine. In addition to commissioning and editing long-form journalism, she is a feature writer who has produced columns at the Globe and Mail, Toronto Life, and Report on Business. Best known for writing about food issues, she explores the environmental and health implications of the industrial food complex, examining the way we produce and consume food to better understand the way we live.
Zack Colman (@zcolman), a Washington-based energy and environmental policy reporter who most recently worked for the Washington Examiner. He has focused on climate change policy, the electric utility and oil and gas industry, and the environmental movement. He has also explored U.S. conservative attitudes and responses to the changing energy and climate landscape in American politics and among the public. Colman’s past stops include The Hill newspaper, trade publication Smart Grid Today, and the Associated Press’ Springfield, Illinois, bureau; while working in Springfield he earned a master’s degree from the University of Illinois-Springfield. He is a Metro Detroit native and Michigan State University alumnus.
Courtney Humphries (@cehumphries), a freelance journalist based in Boston who writes features on new insights and developments in science, medicine, and culture. She covers a wide range of topics, including neuroscience, microbiology, ecology, architecture, and urban planning. Her work has appeared frequently in The Boston Globe’s Ideas section and MIT Technology Review, and she has written for Nature, Science, New Scientist, WIRED, Harvard Magazine, and other publications. She’s the author of “Superdove: How the Pigeon Took Manhattan….And the World,” a nonfiction account of the natural history of street pigeons, published by Smithsonian Books/Harper-Collins in 2008. She has a masters’ degree in science writing from MIT.
Christopher Ketcham (www.christopherketcham.com), a freelance journalist who has been published in Harper’s, The New Republic, VICE, GQ, Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone, Orion, Earth Island Journal, and many other magazines and websites. He is a native of New York City. In recent years he has reported from the American West about wildlife conflicts, ecology, drought, industry deregulation, and environmental degradation. During his fellowship, he will work on a book about the future of the last wild places in the West’s public lands system.
Anja Krieger (@anjakrieger), a freelance journalist based in Berlin, Germany. She reports on the environment, science and technology for the German national public radio network Deutschlandradios and for online and print media such as ZEIT and taz, die tageszeitung. Together with journalists from around the globe, Krieger experiments with trans-boundary environmental journalism within the Climate News Mosaic. The group’s first project was a “glocal” live-blog covering the 2013 climate summit in Warsaw, published on nine different media platforms. Krieger holds a graduate degree in cultural sciences from the European University Viadrina in Frankfurt (Oder), and has studied abroad at the University of Salamanca in Spain and as a visiting scholar at the University of California at Berkeley’s Department of Anthropology.
Federico Kukso (@fedkukso), an independent science journalist in Argentina with 15 years of experience writing about the intersections of science and literature (especially pop culture) and how the arts feed back into scientific research. He writes about science, technology, and culture for popular science magazines such as Muy Interesante Argentina, Quo México, Le Monde Diplomatique, and Scientific American. Previously, he was in charge of the science section of national newspapers like Página/12, Crítica, and Revista Ñ, the cultural magazine of Clarín newspapers. In addition to his writing, Kukso has produced many science TV shows for Discovery Channel, Tecnópolis TV and NatGeo Latin America. He is the author of two books: “All You Need to Know about Science” and “The Bathrooms Weren’t Always Like This.” He is also member of the Argentinian Network of Science Journalism.
Betsy Mason (@betsymason), a California-based science journalist. She was a senior editor at WIRED in charge of online science coverage from 2008 to 2015. She founded the WIRED Science Blogs network and continues to co-author WIRED’s Map Lab blog. Previously, she was the science and national laboratories reporter at the Contra Costa Times in the San Francisco Bay Area, where she won the American Geophysical Union’s David Perlman Award in 2007 for coverage of earthquake risk in California. Mason has a master’s degree in geology from Stanford University and is a graduate of the University of California at Santa Cruz’s Science Communication Program. She is a board member of the Council for the Advancement of Science Writing.
Rod McCullom (@rodmccullom), a biomedical and global health journalist who specializes in reporting on medicine, health disparities, and infectious diseases across the African Diaspora. Much of his recent reporting has focused on the domestic and global HIV/AIDS epidemics. He has reported the epidemic from across Sub-Saharan Africa and been awarded reporting fellowships to Australia, Ethiopia, Kenya, South Africa, Spain, and Zambia. McCullom has written and produced for ABC News, ABC New York City, NBC Chicago, and FOX Chicago. He is a frequent contributor to The Atlantic, and his work has appeared at Scientific American, The Los Angeles Times, Ebony, MSNBC.com, Poz, and many other publications. He also contributed to the anthologies “For Colored Boys Who Have Considered Suicide When The Rainbow Is Still Not Enough” and “Obama and the Gays: A Political Marriage.” McCullom attended the University of Chicago.
Ashley Smart, a science news reporter and features editor at Physics Today. He reports on all of the physical sciences, but he especially enjoys writing about topics at the intersection of physics and biology. He is a member of the governing board of the DC Science Writers Association and the co-founder of HBSciU, a science news blog that specializes in covering research by scientists of African descent and by scientists affiliated with Historically Black Colleges and Universities.
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