KSJ Announces 2025-26 Fellowship Class In August, eleven award-winning journalists will join KSJ at MIT to learn from the world’s top scientists and storytellers.

Yvette Cabrera is a climate and environmental justice reporter whose work illuminating the long-term impacts of systemic environmental practices was honored by the National Press Club Journalism Institute with a 2024 Neil and Susan Sheehan Award for Investigative Journalism. She has reported extensively on the pervasiveness of toxic lead contamination, including the series “Ghosts of Polluters Past,” an investigation into the legacy of lead pollution in urban residential neighborhoods. She presented a 2024 Ted Talk on solutions to this problem and also created a journalist’s guide for reporting on soil lead contamination through a Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center residency. Her reporting won a 2023 international Sigma Award for Data Journalism, and a 2023 Eric and Wendy Schmidt Award for Excellence in Science Communications from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine. She’s worked at Grist, HuffPost, and most recently at the Center for Public Integrity, where her work on the devastating effects of uranium mining on the Navajo Nation won a Paul Tobenkin Memorial Award from Columbia University and a national Edward R. Murrow Award. She is immediate past president of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists, and is a founding member of The Uproot Project, a network for environmental journalists of color. 

Leslye Pritz Davis is an independent filmmaker and journalist. Her current work focuses on the future of human learning and the technologies that will someday replace modern mobile computing devices. Davis studied photojournalism at Western Kentucky University, where she learned to tell observational stories emphasizing intimate, long term connection. Starting in 2012, she worked for nine years as a staff photojournalist, filmmaker, and audio producer at The New York Times. She was a member of the climate reporting pod for The Daily. She has shot, produced and directed award-winning films for outlets including Netflix and PBS. Her work has been recognized by Pictures of the Year International, World Press Photo, The Academy of Television Arts & Sciences, and she was part of a team of Times journalists who were finalists for the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for international reporting.

Liza Lin is the technology reporter and editor (China) for The Wall Street Journal, focusing on topics such as the U.S.-China tech rivalry, supply chains and semiconductors. Currently based in Singapore, she previously reported from Shanghai for the Journal. Liza is a co-author of the 2022 book, “Surveillance State: Inside China’s Quest to Launch a New Era of Social Control.” A former Fulbright Scholar, she was part of teams that won The Gerald Loeb Award, and awards from the National Press Foundation and the New York Press Club; Lin was also named a 2021 finalist for a Pulitzer Prize in international reporting. Prior to the Journal, she worked for Bloomberg News in Singapore and China.

Smriti Mallapaty is a senior reporter for Nature magazine based in Sydney, Australia. She covers the Asia-Pacific region and reports on infectious diseases, biological sciences, and the environment, among other issues. Before joining Nature, she worked as a freelancer in Kathmandu, Nepal. Mallapaty won the inaugural Best Science Journalist award at the Samsung Australian IT Journalism Awards in 2025. She has an MSc with a focus on environmental technology from Imperial College London.

Sarah McBride is a business reporter who places an emphasis on technology and ethics. She worked at Bloomberg Businessweek in San Francisco until recently, and was previously a reporter for Reuters and The Wall Street Journal. McBride has a master’s in journalism from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. Her reporting, including on questions surrounding tech billionaires such as Elon Musk, has led her to be a sought-after expert on talk shows including CNBC, CNN, and Dateline. Her work and detailed investigations have been honored numerous times by the Association of Business Journalists.   

Paula Moura is a multimedia science journalist with 20 years of experience at both U.S. and Brazilian media outlets – including Frontline PBS, The New York Times, Boston’s WBUR, The Washington Post, and NPR’s São Paulo bureau. Since last year she has covered the Brazilian immigrant community for the Martha’s Vineyard Times on Martha’s Vineyard and in Brazil. She received her graduate degree from the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY in New York City. She’s received numerous awards for her work, including an Emmy and a Peabody for her work on the 2022 National Geographic film, “The Territory.”

Rodrigo Pérez Ortega is an award-winning bilingual journalist at Science magazine covering science, medicine, health, policy, diversity and academia. He holds a MS in Science Communication from the University of California, Santa Cruz. He lives in Mexico City and his work has also appeared in The New York Times, Nature, Quanta, Science News, and El País, among others. He won the inaugural Eric and Wendy Schmidt Award for Excellence in Science Communication in 2022, and a Rosalynn Carter Fellowship for Mental Health Journalism in 2019. Most recently, he received the National Association of Science Writers (NASW) Science in Society Award in 2024.

Sara Reardon is a freelance journalist and consulting editor for Nature based in Bozeman, Montana, where she covers biomedical research and the intersection of science and society. Sara has previously worked as a staff reporter for publications including Nature, FiveThirtyEight, Science, and New Scientist. She has an MS in molecular biology from the University of Washington and an MS in physiology from Southern Illinois University. In addition to writing and editing work, Reardon is a trained videographer. Her documentary films, which have focused on issues such as the impact of climate change on farmers’ mental health and tribes’ efforts to save endangered species, have won awards from multiple film festivals.

Stephen Robert Miller is an award-winning freelance journalist specializing in adaptation to climate change. His writing has appeared in National Geographic, Wired, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Sierra Magazine and many others. He has edited for national and regional publications and taught journalism at the University of Colorado-Boulder. A graduate of the University of Arizona, he is the author of the 2023 book, “Over the Seawall: Tsunamis, Cyclones, Drought and the Delusion of Controlling Nature,” which investigated the unintended consequences of disaster defenses in Arizona, Japan and Bangladesh.

Christian von Preysing-Barry is a documentary producer, wildlife cinematographer and reporter for KRGV from McAllen, Texas. He’s covered the U.S.-Mexico border for more than a decade, reporting in both countries in English and Spanish. Christian is Ecuadorian-American. He’s closely covered the issues of water scarcity, oil and gas, commercial space development, immigration and biodiversity. His work explores the resources, species and people that are split by borders, laws, and cultural differences. His news stories have appeared on ABC and CNN. His wildlife documentary work is shared by National Geographic, the BBC, NBC and PBS.

Samira Hamza is an editor, researcher, and science journalist based in Egypt. She heads the visual research team for “Al-Daheeh,” a prominent pop science show in the Arab region. She covers various scientific topics, including health, biodiversity, and climate change. Previously, she was a senior editor for National Geographic for Youth Magazine and led the content team for the tech program “Al-Araby Tech” on Al-Araby TV. Her experience also includes scriptwriting, media research, and translation for outlets like Al-Jazeera and Scientific Arab. Samira holds a journalism degree from the University of Cairo and a media translation diploma from the American University in Cairo. Hamza is the second recipient of the Africa and Middle East Fellowship, which launched in 2024.