alumni notes

A year after its release, Marcia Bartusiak’s (‘95) recent collection of essays “Dispatches from Planet 3” is still reaping new plaudits. In October, the anthology was named a co-winner in the books category of the American Institute of Physics’ Science Communication Awards. Bartusiak will share the award with David Hu, who was recognized for “How to Walk on Water and Climb Up Walls.”

Judges called Bartusiak’s book “well-written and accessible,” and the Institute applauded her for bringing to light stories of unsung female scientists, including Vera Rubin, Jocelyn Bell Burnell, Henrietta Leavitt, and Jane Luu. The award is Bartusiak’s second AIP prize; in 2006, she won the Institute’s Andrew Gemant Award, in recognition of her body of work covering physics and astronomy.

Although Bartusiak retired from the faculty of MIT’s Graduate Program in Science Writing this year, her deft, insightful coverage of physics hasn’t missed a beat: In September, she reviewed “Going Supernova,” a new biography of the mad astronomer Fritz Zwicky, for the Wall Street Journal.

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In other awards news, (‘14) won the National Press Club’s 2019 Michael A. Dornheim Award for his investigative reporting on the aerospace industry. The judges called his work “exemplary and superbly documented and researched.” Harris was recognized along with other National Press Club award recipients at an awards dinner at the Club in August.

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Wayt Gibbs (‘00) is taking the helm of one of the science writing community’s most venerable programs. As the new Program Director for the Council for the Advancement of Science Writing, Gibbs will direct New Horizons in Science, a series of science briefings that have been held annually for 57 years and running. The briefings are now held in conjunction with the annual ScienceWriters conference.

In the meanwhile, Gibbs continues to produce top-flight journalism: He contributed two articles to the latest issue of Anthropocene magazine (“A View from Everywhere All the Time” and “Bottling Sunshine without Batteries”) and edited a third piece by David Quammen.

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Here’s what other alumni are writing, a compendium from Federico Kukso (‘16):

Monika Weiner (‘92): “Neutrinos: Ice-Cold Detective Work,” Faszination Forschung.

Suan Phillips (‘14): “Refinery Explosions Raise New Warnings About Deadly Chemical,” NPR.

Rod McCullom (‘16): “How Bullying May Shape Adolescent Brains,” Undark.

Teresa Carr (‘18): “For Gun Locks and Safes, Lax Oversight and Lousy Design,” Undark.

Meera Subramanian (‘17): “India’s Terrifying Water Crisis,” The New York Times.

Federico Kukso (‘16): “How to travel to Mars without getting out of bed,” Agencia Sinc (in Spanish).

Federico Kukso (‘16): “Invisible Science: Why Are Latin American Science Stories Absent in European and U.S. Media Outlets?” The Open Notebook.

Cynthia Graber (‘13): “The Yogurt Industry Has Been Using CRISPR for a Decade,” The Atlantic.

Daniela Hirschfeld (‘10): “Why an international award is named after a Uruguayan scientist,” El Observador (in Spanish).

Zack Colman (‘16): “A new strategy on climate: Try to outlast Trump,” Politico.

Giovana Girardi (‘15): “Photos tell the story of the destruction of the Amazon, from deforestation to burning,” Estadão (in Portuguese).

Debbie Ponchner (‘04): “Panama Risks Becoming a Broken Link in an Intercontinental Wildlife Route,” Scientific American.

Amanda Gefter (‘13): “How to Understand the Universe When You’re Stuck Inside of It,” Quanta magazine.

Ángela Posada-Swafford (‘01): “The heater manufacturer that changed the history of aviation,” El Tiempo (in Spanish).

Eli Kintisch (‘12): “Arctic researchers prepare to go with the floes,” Science.

Valeria Román (‘05): “Asperger, the condition of environmental activist Greta Thunberg that gives her a ‘superpower’,” Infobae (in Spanish).

Dan Falk (‘12): “How Copernicus moved the Sun,” Astronomy.

Konstantin Kakaes (‘10): “Quantum supremacy from Google? Not so fast, says IBM.” MIT Technology Review.

Sascha Karberg (‘09): “New book about the color blue,” Der Tagesspiegel (in German).

Teresa Firmino (‘09): “Physicist Pedro Vieira is one of the Breakthrough Award winners,” Publico (in Portuguese).

Ann Gibbons (‘88) was named the winner of the American Geophysical Union’s David Perlman Award for Excellence in Science Journalism, for her Science magazine piece “Eruption made 536 ‘the worst year to be alive.’” The prestigious Perlman award is given annually to a science news story published under deadline pressure of one week or less. Judges said that Gibbons story — which chronicles scientists’ discovery of the precise year when massive volcanic eruptions began to plunge parts of Europe, Asia, and the Middle East into darkness — was “crisply told, with strong quotes and just the right level of detail.”

Wrote one committee member, “Ann began with a creative approach and executed it superbly.” Gibbons will receive a $5000 prize and will be honored this December at a ceremony at the AGU Fall meeting in San Francisco.

In other award news, Ian Cheney (’15) and Julia Belluz (’14) were both finalists for the National Academies 2019 Communication Awards. Cheney was part of a team from Sandbox Films and VICE Media that was recognized in the Film/Radio/TV category for its documentary “The Most Unknown.” Belluz and her colleagues at Vox were recognized in the Online category for their entry, “The Mysteries of Weight Loss.”

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With his debut book, “This Land: How Cowboys, Capitalism, and Corruption are Ruining the American West,” Christopher Ketcham (’16) takes readers on a journey across canyons, forests, and other threatened public lands of the western United States. Ketcham spent ten years researching the book, and spoke with ecologists, biologists, botanists, former government employees, whistleblowers, grassroots environmentalists, and other citizens who have been fighting to protect the public domain for future generations.

Published last month by Viking, the book has already received plaudits from such outlets as Kirkus and The LA Times. The Salt Lake City Weekly called it “a striking cry of anguish” that “offers infuriating evidence of a broken system leading to a broken ecosystem.”

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Lauren Whaley (‘17) recently started a gig as managing editor of Crosstown LA, a data journalism outfit based at the University of Southern California that delivers community-level data and analysis on crime, air quality and traffic. She’s enjoying working with students from the journalism, engineering, and design schools on this project. And she loves being back in the university setting. (She’s still freelancing as a health journalist and childbirth and family photographer.)

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Here’s what other alumni are writing, a compendium from Federico Kukso (‘16):

Sasha Chapman (‘16): “Wasted. Our global food system discards 46 million tonnes of fish each year. Why?” Hakai Magazine.

Debbie Ponchner (‘04): “Panama Risks Becoming A Broken Link in an Intercontinental Wildlife Route,” Scientific American.

Amina Khan (‘19): “Microplastic in the atmosphere is making its way to the Arctic,” LA Times.

Daniela Hirschfeld (‘10): “Increases resistance in bacteria that cause diarrhea in the region,” SciDev.Net (in Spanish).

Mico Tatalovic (‘18): “Strange evolution: The weird future of life on Earth,” BBC Future.

Mico Tatalovic (‘18): “Physics in the former Yugoslavia: From socialist dreams to capitalist realities,” Physics Today.

Federico Kukso (‘16): “How to love a robot,” Agencia Sinc (in Spanish):

Cynthia Graber (‘13): “The Fishy Science of Omega-3s,” The Atlantic.

Herton Escobar (‘07): “Brazilian institute head fired after clashing with nation’s president over deforestation data,” Science.

Konstantin Kakaes (‘10): “NASA announces plans to send a drone to explore Titan for signs of life,” MIT Technology Review.

Sascha Karberg (‘09): “How researchers want to save the banana,” Der Tagesspiegel (in German).

Pablo Correa (‘13): “Jorge Reynolds, the man who did not invent the pacemaker,” El Espectador (in Spanish).

Valeria Román (‘05): “New approach to diagnose and treat Chagas disease,” SciDev.Net (in Spanish).

The last thing Reto Schneider (’98) remembered, before his car veered off the Pacific Rim Highway and into a ditch, was his wife and his 13-year-old son sleeping peacefully in the back seat. Schneider, who was at the wheel, fell asleep too. By the time he woke up, the car had rolled over and the ground was rushing toward him.

The harrowing incident became the subject of Schneider’s May 2018 feature “Die Strasse hat mir vergeben” (“The road has forgiven me”), for the German-language publication NZZ Folio. The piece was recently awarded a 2019 Zürcher Journalistenpreis, the most prestigious journalism award in Switzerland.

As Schneider describes it, his story explores “the nature of accidents in a technologically advanced society where amazingly little effort is sufficient to cause great suffering.” He adds that “it is also a reflection on the function of endless rumination and the deeply felt guilt for things that can no longer be changed.”

And don’t worry: Schneider and his family survived the accident, and he says they are all doing well.

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Ibby Caputo (‘15) is among the three journalists selected to receive a $6,000 reporting award from New York University’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute this year. Established in 2009, the award supports journalism that is “significant,” “underreported,” and “in the public interest.” Caputo’s reporting project emphatically checks off all three of those boxes: She’ll use her stipend to investigate racial and ethnic disparities in bone marrow donor registries.

Caputo has also been busy at work on a new podcast, “Overheard at National Geographic,” about the unusual conversations that go on around National Geographic’s Washington, D.C., headquarters. Eager to give it a listen? You need wait no longer: The first three episodes are now available for streaming at the National Geographic website.

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Here’s what other alumni are writing, a compendium from Federico Kukso (’16):

Karen Brown (‘13): “How Much Does DNA Change Our Life Story?” The New York Times.

Debbie Ponchner (‘04): “Why Some Amazonian Societies Survived and Others Perished amid Pre-Columbian Droughts,” Scientific American.

Federico Kukso (‘16): “Kaijutitan maui: the Godzilla of dinosaurs,” Tangible (In Spanish).

Mićo Tatalović (‘18): “‘I wash all my food like crazy’: scientists voice concern about nanoparticles,” The Guardian.

Mićo Tatalović (‘18): “The Newest Lab Rat Has Eight Arms,” Hakai.

George Musser (‘15): “Machine Learning Gets a Bit More Humanlike,” Scientific American.

Cynthia Graber (‘13): “Will Food Delivery Ruin the Perfect French Fry?” The Atlantic.

Angela Swafford (‘01): “The ground you step on: the new geological map of South America,” Muy Interesante México (In Spanish).

Dan Falk (‘12): “What is gravity?” NBC News.

Teresa Firmino (‘09): “Anthropocene: ‘Humans are becoming a geological force’,” Publico (In Portuguese).

Herton Escobar (‘07): “Brazilian government accused of suppressing data that would call its war on drugs into question,” Science.

Adam Rogers (‘03): “Let’s Build a Global Skyscraper Network to Save the Planet,” Wired.

Valeria Román (‘05): “Biomedicine: 5 trends that will transform healthcare in the next decade,” Infobae (In Spanish).

Robin Lloyd (‘99): “Cured in Place? An Underground Pipe Repair Raises Questions,” Undark.

Maura O’Connor (‘17) recently published her second book, Wayfinding: The Science and Mystery of How Humans Navigate the World (St. Martin’s Press). She says the book, which is receiving wide-ranging praise, was positively influenced by her year as a KSJ fellow. “It includes a half a dozen interviews with scholars and scientists at MIT and Harvard, and I cite many influential studies and conferences from the scientific community in Cambridge and Boston. Additionally, moving to Cambridge gave me a really perfect opportunity to practice wayfinding in a new place at the same time that I was trying to understand this process from a scholarly perspective.”

Meera Subramanian (‘17)  wrapped up a nine-part series on perceptions of climate change among conservative Americans for InsideClimate News, joined the Society of Environmental Journalists Board of Directors, and became a contributing editor of Orion, a quarterly magazine focused on nature, culture, and place. Subramanian will be teaching creative nonfiction at the Sewanee School of Letters in the summer of 2019 and then serving as the Currie C. and Thomas A. Barron Visiting Professor in the Environment and the Humanities at Princeton University for the 2019-2020 academic year. In the in-betweens, she continues to freelance write.

And in other news… A paper that Mićo Tatalović (‘18) wrote during his KSJ fellowship, looking at representations of science in the TV show Seinfeld, has now been published in the Journal of Science & Popular Culture. Tatalović was also recognized in MIT News for his contributions to research on training neural networks to write about science… Mark Wolverton (‘17) recently signed a contract with MIT Press to write a book in their Essential Knowledge series, on nuclear weapons. It will be his fifth book, following last year’s release of Burning the Sky, which told the story of a secretive cold-war-era nuclear testing program.

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Here’s what other alumni are writing, a compendium from Federico Kukso (‘16):

Christine Mlot (‘94): “Imported wolves settle in as Lake Superior island teems with moose,” Science.

Teresa Carr (‘18): “Mushroom magic: why the latest health fad might be on to something,” The Guardian.

Valeria Román (‘05): “War on Superbugs,” Infobae (in Spanish).

Rowan Jacobsen (‘18): “Rebuilt Wetlands Can Protect Shorelines Better Than Walls,” Scientific American.

Chloé Hecketsweiler (‘17): “Fake breasts and real scandals, the incredible saga of the silicone,” Le Monde (in French).

Rod McCullom (‘16): “AI Tool Could Help Diagnose Alzheimer’s,” Scientific American.

Federico Kukso (‘16): “Micro-plastics: the new diet of the human being,” Tangible (in Spanish).

Courtney Humphries (2015-16): “The ‘mind-boggling’ task of protecting New York City from rising seas,” MIT Technology Review.

Zack Colman (‘16): “White House eyes energy push as Russia strategy,” Politico.

Olga Dobrovidova (‘15): “Russia joins in global gene-editing bonanza,” Nature.

Julia Belluz (‘14): “2019 is shaping up to be a very bad year for measles,” Vox.

Eli Kintisch (‘12): “The overworld,” Science.

Konstantin Kakaes (‘10): “No, scientists didn’t just “reverse time” with a quantum computer,” MIT Technology Review.

Teresa Firmino (’09): “This is the first atlas of amphibians and reptiles of Angola in more than 120 years,” Publico (in Portuguese).

Jeff Tollefson (‘05): “US nuclear-weapons agency offers lifeline to elite science-advisory group,” Nature.

Daniela Hirschfeld (‘10): “Uruguayan scientist finds for the first time in fungi the amino acid selenocysteine,” La Diaria (in Spanish).

March 25, 2019

On October 12, 2014, Scott Huler (’15) stepped into a canoe in Charleston, South Carolina. Nine months later, he stepped out of one in the small North Carolina town of Bath, near where the Pamlico River empties into the Atlantic. In between, he had hiked and paddled hundreds of miles of Carolina Backcountry in an attempt to retrace the steps taken by explorer John Lawson some 300 years earlier. Huler, who made the ambitious trek as a 2014-15 Knight Science Journalism Project fellow, has now turned that adventure into a book: A Delicious Country, published this month by University of North Carolina Press.

During the original trek, Lawson — a naturalist and writer — produced a rich catalogue of the flora, fauna, geography, and people of the little explored Carolina interior. Huler, in his modern-day recreation, did much the same, except in decidedly higher tech fashion: He documented his travels on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, interactive maps, and a blog called “The Lawson Trek.” Several of his blog posts were republished by Scientific American and at the Knight Science Journalism website.

Huler’s observations and encounters have yielded a book that’s being called an “eye-opening journey through the contemporary South.” You can learn more about the book and the project at The Lawson Trek blog, which Huler continues to update.

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Chloe Hecketsweiler (’17) has been named France’s “science journalist of the year” in the category of written media, for her participation in the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists’ collaborative investigation of medical implant failures, and for her stories on emerging technologies such as genetic engineering. Hecketsweiler reported on topics including designer babies, human-animal chimeras, and the use of synthetic biology by the food industry.

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Valeria Román (‘05) is bringing serious science policy conversations to the halls of the Argentine Congress. Late last year, the former fellow organized and moderated a seminar called “Money for Argentine science: how to get information about the budget and understand it” at the Chamber of Deputies building in Buenos Aires. (The Chamber is the lower house of the Argentine National Congress, analogous to the U.S. House of Representatives.) Román organized the seminar as a member of the Argentine Network of Science Journalism. She says the seminar gave journalists, professors, and students an opportunity to learn about the evolution of Argentina’s science, technology, and innovation budget. The video of the seminar is now available here.

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Jason Palmer (’14) has been named the host of The Economist’s new flagship, daily podcast, The Intelligence. Palmer will be supported by a team of eight editors and producers, and a global network of correspondents. The Economist’s Deputy Editor Tom Standage describes the show’s format this way: “Each 20-minute episode will kick off with a news segment, followed by a feature, and finally include a jolly segment that is spun around an unusual fact or statistic.”

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Here’s what other alumni are writing: a compendium from Federico Kukso (’16).

Pablo Correa (’13): “Surgery with robots was not a good idea in cancer patients,” El Espectador (in Spanish).

Valeria Román (’05): “Who are the 5 Argentine scientists who are changing the health of humans and the planet,” Infobae (in Spanish).

Iván Carrillo (’17): “The next big earthquake: How vulnerable are we?,” Tangible/El Universal (in Spanish).

Mićo Tatalović (’18): “Serbia is rethinking science — but the reforms could cost hundreds of jobs,” Nature.

Jane Qiu (’18): “China creating national medical ethics committee to oversee high-risk clinical trials,” STAT.

Rod McCullom (’16): “Google Searches Could Predict Heroin Overdoses,” Scientific American.

Courtney Humphries (’16): “How Amazon Prime will change the way our cities look,” Boston Globe.

Federico Kukso (’16): “The hidden side of the Periodic Table of the Elements,” Tangible/El Universal (in Spanish).

Giovana Girardi (’15): “,” Estadao (in Portuguese).

Dan Falk (’12): “How Artificial Intelligence Is Changing Science,” Quanta.

Sascha Karberg (’09): “Depression: therapy by algorithm,” Horizons.

Teresa Firmino (’09): “Once upon a time a star exploded regularly in Andromeda,” Publico (in Portuguese).

Herton Escobar (’07): “Bolsonaro’s first moves have Brazilian scientists worried,” Science.

Jeff Tollefson (’05): “Tropical Africa could be a key to solving methane mystery,” Nature.

Clive Thompson (’03): “Our Ears Are Unlocking an Era of Aural Data,” Wired.

For Betsy Mason (’16), the past five years have basically been one long deep dive into the world of maps. And now she has a gorgeous new book to show for it.

Last fall, Mason and her writing partner Greg Miller published All Over the Map: A Cartographic Odyssey, a beautifully illustrated, large-format book about maps, mapmakers, and cartography. Mason says she discovered several of the book’s more than 200 maps while exploring Harvard’s map collection during her KSJ fellowship year. The compendium has earned plaudits from CityLab’s Laura Bliss, who wrote that “with an eye for splendor, Mason and Miller dredge up stories of the past through the medium of maps, often with something to say about the present. Their new book binds hundreds of evocative maps into one volume, stitched with approachable, illuminating prose.”

Meanwhile, Mason’s online writing has also been generating buzz: Her recent story about common geographic misconceptions, “Why Your Mental Map of the World is Probably Wrong,” was highlighted as one of National Geographic’s best stories of 2018.

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The prolific Steve Nadis (‘98) has added yet another book to his lengthy resume. This month, he published The Shape of a Life (Yale University Press), coauthored with Harvard University mathematician Shing-Tung Yau. The book, an autobiography of Yau, charts how the Harvard professor rose from impoverished childhood beginnings in China and Hong Kong to become a Fields medalist and one of the world’s foremost experts on differential geometry. Novelist Gish Jen calls it “candid, deep, and truly inspiring… an extraordinary story about an extraordinary person.”

Nadis and Yau will hold a book talk and signing at the Harvard Book Store on Tuesday, February 26th at 7pm.

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Although Gary Taubes (’97) still writes the occasional book and article about health and nutrition science, he’s also doing more than just covering those issues from the sidelines. In 2011, Taubes co-founded the Nutrition Science Initiative—or NuSI—a nonprofit that funds targeted nutrition research, which Taubes says has been woefully neglected by NIH and other government funding agencies.

Last month, a NuSI-funded study on nutritional guidelines for children with fatty liver disease, published in JAMA, was the subject of a write-up in the New York Times. It was the second time in a matter of months that NuSI’s work caught the attention of the Gray Lady: In November, the Times picked up a NuSI-funded study exploring the weight-loss effects of low-carb diets, which had been published in BMJ.

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Over the past several years, KSJ’s founding director, Victor McElheny, has written more than a dozen “Milestone of Innovation” columns for the business, science, and tech site Xconomy.com, in which he celebrates anniversaries of important dates in science history. His latest installment, “Holding the Mirror Up to Our Planet”, concerned the 50th anniversary of the famous Apollo 8 flight into, and back from, orbit around the moon—the same mission that resulted in the iconic “earth rise” photo by astronaut Bill Anders.

Says McElheny, “When I covered the flight for the Boston Globe I wrote that the moon had been converted in the human imagination from a decorative lamp in the evening sky to a place for explorers to visit.” 50 years later, those words still ring true.

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And in other alumni news…

Ellen Shell (’85) continues to make a splash with her latest book, The Job. The former fellow was featured on a recent episode of the podcast Recode Decode, where she “explained why some of the conventional wisdom about the future of work is misguided and offered pragmatic advice for people entering an increasingly automated job market.”

Angela Posada-Swafford (‘01) published a captivating photoessay in Nature called “A voyage to map Earth’s polar ice from the sky—in pictures,” which chronicles her flight over Antarctica with NASA’s IceBridge Mission.

Sujata Gupta (’18) has a new job on a very exciting beat: She recently joined Science News as their social sciences reporter. Congrats!

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January 18, 2019

Mark Wolverton (‘17) published his fourth book, Burning the Sky (Overlook Press), a gripping tale about a secret Cold-War program to perform Nuclear Tests in Outer Space, known as Operation Argus.

A glowing review in Nature calls Burning the Sky “informative and balanced in [its] attention to diplomacy, science and biography,” and says that Wolverton provides “much to ponder concerning the state of play now, from the nuclearization of North Korea to the unkown future of the Iran nuclear deal.”

Congratulations Mark!

Here’s what other alumni are writing: a compendium from Federico Kukso (’16).

Courtney Humphries (‘16): “Digital immortality: How your life’s data means a version of you could live forever,” MIT Technology Review.

Pablo Correa (‘13): “A Colombian in the big leagues of mathematics,” El Espectador (in Spanish).

Aleszu Bajak (‘14): “Science in Colombia on the cusp of change,” Nature.

Jeff Tollefson (‘05): “‘Tropical Trump’ victory in Brazil stuns scientists,” Nature.

Federico Kukso (‘16): “The first great plague in history (that we know of),” Tangible/El Universal (in Spanish).

Marcin Rotkiewicz (‘09): “Is Europe Lost for GMOs?,” Aspen Review.

Iván Carrillo (‘17): “No gasoline?: Given the shortage in Mexico City, efficiency in consumption,” Tangible/El Universal (in Spanish).

Debbie Ponchner (‘04): “How Many Manatees Are There? There’s an Algorithm for That,” Scientific American.

Zack Colman (‘16): “Question for Democrats: What is a ‘Green New Deal’?” Politico.

Daniela Hirschfeld (‘10): “A year of shocks in regional scientific policy,” SciDev (in Spanish).

Adam Rogers (‘03): “Is ’Oumuamua an Alien spaceship? Sure! Except, No,” Wired.

Steve Mirsky (‘04): “Ravenmaster Christopher Skaife Tells of His Relationships with the Tower of London’s Resident Birds,” Scientific American.

Valeria Román (‘05): “Rewilding: the challenge of repopulating the world,” Tangible/El Universal (in Spanish).

Susan Phillips (‘14): “How the Clean Water Act fixed the Delaware River’s pollution problem,” WHYY.

Cynthia Graber (‘13) and Nicola Twilley: “Sweet and Low (Calorie): The Story of Artificial Sweeteners,” Gastropod.

Justin Gillis (‘05): “Forget the Carbon Tax for Now,” The New York Times.

Esther Nakkazi (‘08): “No redress likely for 45 sacked Makere University staff,” University World News.