May 31, 2018
Combining passions for climbing and research: Luke Timmerman at the top of the world.
At 6:25 a.m. on May 22, an exultant Luke Timmerman (2005-06) reached the summit of Mount Everest. After writing about advances in cancer research for 15 years, and climbing mountains almost that long, he decided to combine the two passions in a fund-raising effort for the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in his hometown of Seattle, “and to support science itself at a moment of tremendous possibility.”
Luke chronicled the climb on Twitter and on his website, the Timmerman Report. On May 25 he reported, “Safe and sound now at Yak and Yeti Hotel in Kathmandu, after two-day descent from the world’s highest mountain. Time for a shower, a shave, and a big celebration with teammates.” And on May 31 he tweeted a picture of Safeco Field with the caption “Sweet home Seattle.” As of that day, he’d raised $338,460 toward a goal of $375,000.
“The Most Unknown,” a documentary by the Peabody Award-winning Ian Cheney (2014-15), is opening in June in theaters from Anchorage to Cambridge, and will be released on Netflix in August. The 85-minute film follows nine scientists around the globe in their efforts to answer some of science’s supreme questions, like the nature of consciousness and how life began. It’s the first feature-length documentary from Motherboard, Vice Media’s tech-culture channel. (You can watch a trailer here.)
Ian, who was advised on the project by Werner Herzog, is known for documentaries like “King Corn” (2007) and “The Search for General Tso” (2014) — and “The Measure of a Fog,” his six-part exploration of climate change for Undark in 2016-17.
In The New Yorker, Sarah Larson calls “The Most Unknown” “gorgeous” and “amiable,” and adds that “Cheney’s goal isn’t so much to inform as to inspire, and it’s vicariously exciting to watch his subjects step out of their own research and into that of their peers.”
From Moscow, Olga Dobrovidova (2014–15) reports that she’s been working as a freelance and staff writer and teaching science journalism at ITMO University, in Russia’s first graduate program in science communication. She has translated two books into Russian: “A Field Guide for Science Writers” and Matt Shipman’s “Handbook for Science Public Information Officers” — “the first books on science journalism and scicomm published in our language,” Olga writes. And she is the freshly minted vice president for science journalism at AKSON, the Russian science communicators’ association.
Olga is one of several KSJ alumni who will be featured at the European Conference of Science Journalists in Toulouse, France, on July 8. She’ll speak on a panel moderated by Mićo Tatalović (2017-18) about the challenges facing science journalists in Eastern Europe. Others are Tom Zeller (2013-14), editor in chief of Undark, on a panel about nonprofit and philanthropic journalism; Tatalović and Maryn McKenna (2013-14), on preserving freelance and staff writers’ independence; Aleszu Bajak (2013-14), on data visualization; and Richard Hudson (1991-92) and Adam Rogers (2002-03), along with several Undark staffers, at a Kavli workshop on science editing led by KSJ Director Deborah Blum.
Rosalia Omungo (2016-17) has been elected to the Kenya Editors’ Guild, the foremost body for senior journalists in Kenya. “The guild hopes to reclaim its rightful place in Kenya’s media landscape,” she writes, “most importantly by pushing for the entrenchment of media freedom.”
The New York Times’ Pam Belluck (2007-08) won a New York Press Club award in science, medicine, and technology feature writing for “Zika’s Legacy: Catastrophic Consequences of a Continuing Crisis.”
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