Knight Science Journalism at MIT has selected twelve journalists working in six countries for its 32nd class of Fellows. The journalists will study science, health, environment and technology at MIT during the academic year 2014-15.
Rachael Buchanan is the Medical Producer for BBC News. She has been a science & health journalist for the BBC for 14 years, producing pieces about science and medicine for TV, radio and online.
Ibby Caputo reports on the health of people and communities in and around the Greater Boston area for WGBH Radio and TV. Her work has aired nationally on PRI’s The World, NPR News, All Things Considered, and internationally on the BBC’s Boston Calling. Her journalism, essays and photography have been published in The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, Cape Cod Times, The Times-Picayune, Women & Cancer magazine and elsewhere.
Ian Cheney is an Emmy-nominated and Peabody Award-winning documentary filmmaker. His films and collaborations include King Corn (2007), The Greening of Southie (2008), Truck Farm (2010), The City Dark (2011), The Melungeons (2013) and The Search for General Tso (2014).
Zheng Cui is a journalist working with Caixin Media, a leading media group in China, specializing in environment and science reporting. She is based in Beijing, China.
Olga Dobrovidova is a news reporter and producer based in Moscow, Russia. She spent four years working at the Science and Environment desk with the country’s leading newswire service, RIA Novosti, and is also a columnist for Responding to Climate Change (UK), where she writes about Russian climate change policy and practice.
Oriana Fernandez is journalist since 2002. She is a reporter of La Tercera newspaper, and also worked in La Segunda and El Mostrador.cl. Oriana covers issues like the impact of Climate Change, the effects of pollution in communities and problems with public and private heath in Chile.
Gideon Gil is health and science editor of The Boston Globe, where he has directed print and online coverage of health care, science, and the environment for 10 years. His reporters have won one Pulitzer Prize, for coverage of stem cells, and twice been named finalists. He previously was a medical reporter and editor at the Louisville Courier-Journal, where he was part of a team awarded a Pulitzer for investigating the causes of a fatal bus crash that took 27 lives. He is a board member of the Association of Health Care Journalists and chairs its membership committee and Boston chapter.
Giovana Girardi is a science and environmental reporter from O Estado de S. Paulo, one of the biggest newspapers in Brazil. She has been working on these issues for about 13 years. More recently, she has been focusing on climate change research, on the diplomatic negotiations surrounding a new global agreement to curb greenhouse gas emissions, on biodiversity and humans interactions with it, and and also writing about environmental issues in cities. In the last few years she reported from summits like Rio+20 and Conferences of the Parties of UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. And has also followed scientists in their field studies in places like Amazon Forest, Atlantic Forest and other brazilian biomes.
Matt Kaplan is a science correspondent with The Economist in London. Over the years he has also contributed to Nature, Science, New Scientist, Scientific American, National Geographic, and the New York Times. He is the author of The Science of Monsters.
Kathleen McLaughlin is a journalist based in Beijing, China, who writes for The Economist, the Guardian and numerous other media outlets. She has reported across Asia and East Africa on science and medical issues, including the legacy of China’s plasma industry and resulting AIDS epidemic, China’s influence on health care in Africa and counterfeit malaria drugs and the spread of drug-resistant malaria in Asia and Africa.
George Musser is a contributing editor at Scientific American magazine in New York. He was the magazine’s senior editor for space science from 1998 to 2012, when he left the full-time staff to focus on book-writing. He received the 2011 Science Writing Award from the American Institute of Physics in 2011 and Jonathan Eberhart Planetary Sciences Journalism Award from the American Astronomical Society in 2010. His first book, The Complete Idiot’s Guide to String Theory, was published by Alpha in 2008.
Bob Young is a staff reporter at The Seattle Times, where he covers marijuana as Washington state creates history by legalizing production and sale of the drug. He has also reported on politics and urban affairs in his 12 years at the paper and been a staff writer for the Times’ Sunday magazine.
The new Knights were chosen by a committee composed of Philip J. Hilts, director, Knight Science Journalism at MIT; Charles Petit, science writer and KSJ Tracker; Cynthia Graber, freelance journalist; Amanda Gefter, writer and consultant at New Scientist magazine; and John Durant, director of the MIT Museum.