Knight Science Journalism @MIT
Science Journalism in the Public Interest
The latest news, announcements, fellow and alumni updates, and other dispatches from the Knight Science Journalism Program.
Two 2010-‘11 Knight Fellows are winners of The Society of Environmental Journalists (SEJ) 12th Annual Awards for Reporting on the Environment.
Hillary Rosner was awarded First Place, Outstanding Feature Story, for her article “Attack of the Mutant Pupfish,” which appeared in the December 2012 issue of Wired.
Matt McGrath was awarded Honorable Mention, Outstanding Beat Reporting, Large Market, for his work as Environment Correspondent at BBC News.
Congratulations to both Hillary and Matt!
The Knight Science Journalism Program at MIT has selected Maryn McKenna as its 2013-2014 Journalism Project Fellow. She will carry out research on food science and food production and will produce a book-length text and a series of multimedia stories from the research.
She is a journalist and author who writes about public health, global health, medicine, and food policy. She has reported from a field hospital in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina, a village on Thailand’s west coast that was erased by the Indian Ocean tsunami, a CDC team investigating the anthrax- letter attacks on Capitol Hill, a graveyard within the Arctic Circle that held victims of the 1918 flu, a malaria hospital in Malawi, an isolation ward for multi-drug resistant TB in Vietnam and a polio-eradication team in India. She is the author of SUPERBUG: The Fatal Menace of MRSA (Free Press/Simon & Schuster, 2010), an investigation of the global epidemic of drug-resistant staph, which received the 2013 June Roth Memorial Book Award and the 2011 Science in Society Award; and BEATING BACK THE DEVIL: On the Front Lines with the Disease Detectives of the Epidemic Intelligence Service (FP/S&S, 2004), which recounts a year she spent embedded with the CDC’s rapid- reaction force and which was named a Top Science Book by Amazon and an Outstanding Academic Title by the American Library Association. She is a columnist for Scientific American and blogs for Wired. She is a Senior Fellow of the Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism at Brandeis University.
Erich Hoyt, Senior Research Fellow, WDC, the Whale and Dolphin Conservation and 1985-‘86 Fellow, won the The European Cetacean Society Mandy McMath Conservation Award. The award was presented to Hoyt this past April at the annual ECS conference in Setubal, Portugal. Hoyt was selected for his outstanding achievements in the field of cetacean conservation around the world. For more information about he award, visit The European Cetacean Society web site.
In addition to The European Cetacean Society Mandy McMath Conservation Award”
Knight Science Journalism at MIT has selected twelve journalists working in six countries for its 31st class of Fellows. The journalists will study science, health, environment and technology at MIT during the academic year 2013-14.
Catalina Arevalo is an environment correspondent for the leading Spanish language news agency, EFE, based in Madrid, Spain.
Aleszu Bajak is a freelance journalist and founder of LatinAmericanScience.org, a weekly bilingual digest of science news out of Central and South America.
Julia Belluz is the senior editor at The Medical Post, a contributing writer at Maclean’s magazine, and creator of the blog Science-ish, based in Toronto, Canada.
Nick Clark is a Doha, Qatar-based anchor/correspondent with Al Jazeera English.
Rachel Ehrenberg is an interdisciplinary sciences/chemistry writer, with Science News, based in Washington, DC.
Mark Harris is a freelance writer for The Economist and The Sunday Times, among others, and a contributing editor at IEEE Spectrum. He is based in Seattle, WA.
Lynda Mapes of Seattle, WA is a staff writer at the Seattle Times, specializing in natural history, environmental topics and native cultures.
Jason Palmer is a science and technology reporter with BBC News, based in London.
Susan Phillips is an energy reporter and multi-media journalist with StateImpactPennsylvania, a joint project of NPR/WHYY/witf.
Jonathan Sahula is a freelance film and video editor and producer who frequently works for PBS’s NOVA. He is based in Boston, MA.
Yves Sciama is a freelance journalist from Grenoble, France. His work has appeared in Science et Vie, La Recherche, and Le Monde.
Tom Zeller is a senior reporter with the Huffington Post, primarily covering energy and the environment.
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; Susan Moran, freelance journalist; Joyce Murdoch, former Washington Post editor and reporter; and John Durant, director of the MIT Museum.
JoNel Aleccia
NBC News
Elizabeth Baier
Minnesota Public Radio
Tasha Eichenseher
Discover
Andre Gallant
Athens (Ga.) Banner-Herald
Katharine Gammon
Freelancer
Susan Heavey
Thomson Reuters
Karin Klein
Los Angeles Times
Renee Pellerin
Canadian Broadcasting Corporation
Catherine Price
Penguin Press
Luis Silvestre
Sabado Newsmagazine
Susan West
Food and Environment Reporting Network
Angela Yeoh
Independent / Wall Street Journal
The Knight Science Journalism program at MIT will offer a new kind of Fellowship during the 2013-2014 academic year to add to the traditional 12 Fellows who come to Cambridge to study for the academic year at MIT and Harvard. This new Fellowship is intended to produce a publishable product instead of coming only to study.
The proposed projects should combine in some way science journalism and digital media. The product at the end of the year should be something tangible such as a video, audio, or digital piece or a written work if the subject includes or can be published in some digital form. Collaborations with news organizations are strongly encouraged.
The requirements of the Fellowship will be to work at least partly in Cambridge, to attend some seminars of the Knight Fellowship, and to present updates on the project to the director and the other Knight Fellows. The final project should be completed by May 30, 2014.
The length of the Fellowship is up to nine months starting in August 2013. A stipend based on your proposed project, project expenses and the length on the project will be determined once the project is chosen.
In the application, each candidate will submit a detailed description of the project, a timetable for completion, a proposed budget of expenses, plans for publication, a biographical statement and three letters of recommendation.
The deadline for applications will be announced in a few weeks.
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