The director of the Knight Science Journalism Program at MIT, Deborah Blum, has announced that she will retire in the summer of 2025, following the close of the current academic year. When her tenure ends in July, she will have served—as long planned—for a decade as leader of this globally renowned program.
A Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and best-selling author, Blum arrived at MIT in 2015 after stints at several newspapers, including The Sacramento Bee, and nearly eighteen years as a professor of journalism at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is the fourth director in the Knight Science Journalism Program’s more than 40-year history and the first woman to serve in this role.
Under Blum’s leadership, the program has expanded both its reach and its stature. Blum helped oversee the creation of Undark, an award-winning nonprofit digital magazine that now has circulation in the millions. She launched new ventures to support science journalism, including a free digital handbook for science editors, a fact-checking training and resource program for journalists around the world, and the Victor K. McElheny Award for local and regional science reporting.
During Blum’s tenure, the program also expanded its fellowship offerings to include important new opportunities for early career science journalists, journalists from Africa and the Middle East, and journalism students at Historically Black Colleges and Universities.
Blum has also worked to strengthen the program’s commitment to the elite groups of science writers who come to MIT each year as part of the program’s core academic-year fellowship, increasing the annual stipend and expanding the training options to include ambitious field trips, including a visit to Vermont last year to view the total solar eclipse. She has also worked to increase the program’s role as a standard bearer for excellence in science journalism, in a time when science and technology have become transformative forces in areas ranging from climate change to global pandemics to the expanding reach of artificial intelligence.
“At this moment in history, science journalists are uniquely important to telling the story of medical, health, and environmental research and its impacts on the planet and its inhabitants,” Blum says. “And we tell that story without fear or favor, as the saying goes, illuminating science in all its complicated human dimensions. That has never been more important.”
MIT has convened a search committee, chaired by Professor Will Deringer, to identify the program’s next director. The committee seeks an accomplished journalist who can anchor the program within both MIT and the broader science writing community, overseeing fellowships, outreach, and training activities, developing new initiatives to advance science journalism, and serving as publisher of Undark magazine, among other responsibilities.
For more information, see the full job description below, or at the MIT Careers website. Questions regarding the search may be directed to Paree Pinkney, Director of Administration and Finance for the Program in Science, Technology, and Society, MIT.
Blum expressed hope that the Knight Science Journalism program, which is endowed by the James S. and John L. Knight Foundation, will remain steadfast in its work to find innovative ways to support journalism during this challenging moment for the field. “I’m proud of the work I’ve been able to do in recognition of my favorite profession,” she said. “And I look forward to seeing the new director bring fresh vision and enthusiasm to this remarkable program.”
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