News

1989-90 Knight Fellow Jos van den Broek has published a new textbook on visual communication: “Visual Language – Perspectives for Both Makers and Users.” For more information, please visit: http://www.elevenpub.com/social- sciences/catalogus/visual-language-1

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2008-09 Knight fellow and former KSJ multimedia manager Dianne Finch has been named a Reynolds Visiting Business Journalism Professor at Elon University, under a grant-funded program administered through the Donald W. Reynolds National Center for Business Journalism at Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication.

Read the full announcement at cronkite.asu.edu/node/2672

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Dear Bush, Knight and Boot Camp Fellows:

With the new Knight Science web page here, and with our 30th anniversary coming up next February, I’d like to urge each of you to submit, for the web page, a new paragraph on your latest and best achievements. This would add up to an amazingly varied tapestry of the great work you have been doing, and illustrate what a vibrant, worldwide community of science journalism we are continually building.</p

As founding director of the MIT Knight Program, I have volunteered to correspond with you about this, including questions that may occur to you.

As an example, I’ll try a few lines about me:

Now that Basic Books has put out Drawing the Map of Life, my history of the Genome Project, as a paperback with a 4,000-word update to the beginning of 2012, I’ve started planning something risky: a 100-page essay about the array of science/technology tasks the United States and many other countries have been ducking for almost 40 years. Meanwhile, I continue active at MIT and the Knight Science Journalism program, and in the 210-member “age-in-community” organization in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and neighboring towns that my wife founded in 2007.

I hope you’ll give this request priority. I want all the friends and supporters of the MIT Knight program to get a taste of what we all are accomplishing.

Since dispersing at the close of their fellowship year at MIT, the 1993-94 Fellows have nearly all kept in close touch with each other as their lives, careers and families have evolved. These connections have included photos and news shared in a Facebook group, frequent visits when two Fellows find themselves in the same city, wedding receptions, and most significantly a regular series of reunions. Every other summer since leaving MIT, a majority of the group has gathered for a few days in a series of colorful locales: the Outer Banks, Cape Cod, Lake Tahoe, the Rockies, Quebec City, Moscow, and Tuscany.

The largest reunion took place over the July 4, 2012, holiday, on the Olympic Peninsula in Washington State. Ten of the 11 former fellows and the acting director that year, David Ansley (who also organized the reunion), made it, together with spouses, partners and children, adding up to a group of 30. They spent several days together, hiking the rainforest and beaches, cooking huge meals, remembering the year at MIT and talking about current events and journalistic challenges. Attendees came from Australia, Germany, California, Wisconsin, Washington and the East Coast.

Among the highlights was a field seminar – a tidepool walk at Salt Creek County Park, led by Ansley’s daughter Kaza, who was 4 during the Fellowship year but now has a marine biology degree. During that beach trip, the Fellows re-enacted their official fellowship photograph, borrowing a weathered drift log in place of MIT campus sculpture. The only two people missing from the new photo are fellow Etsuko Furukori (whom the group has lost contact with), and former administrative assistant Linda Lowe.

— David Ansley, Acting Director, 93-94

Dee Ann Divis (03-04) recently received the Robert D.G. Lewis Watchdog Award, the highest journalistic honor awarded by the Washington, D.C. chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists. Dee Ann writes for Inside GNSS, a magazine covering satellite navigation systems. Her work can be found at insideGNSS.com.

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Judith Horstman (Bush, 1986-87) has another new book: The Scientific American Healthy Aging Brain. Published in June by Josssy-Bass, it has blurbs from Dr. Oz, Dan Goleman and Marc Agronin who calls it “a must read for all aging brains!” It’s a realistic but encouraging overview of normal aging, a sobering look at what can go wrong, and the latest in what neuroscience is finding might help your brain stay healthy longer. Horstman says the challenge of writing four brain books in four years is helping keep her own aging brain sharp. For more see: www.judithhorstman.com or her Amazon Author page: http://amzn.to/JTCZXf.