fellow profiles Archives - Knight Science Journalism @MIT

by Alex Ip / December 19th 2023 / Fellowship Life

Investigative Reporter Chikezie Omeje, on the Future of What It Means to Be Human

For investigative reporter Chikezie Omeje, an opportunity delayed is not an opportunity denied. Omeje was named an MIT Knight Science Journalism Fellow in early 2020, while he was completing a journalism master’s degree in New York City. At the time, he was planning to use the fellowship to study the connection between epigenetics and the developing brain: How do poverty and inequality during early childhood turn on or off certain genes that affect life achievements? Are governments intervening early enough to ensure that the potential of their youngest is not stunted?

But those plans unraveled when MIT’s physical campus closed due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Instead, the native Nigerian, stuck stateside, worked as a freelance reporter and then served as an Africa editor at the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project.

Three years later, Omeje’s Knight Science Journalism Fellowship has finally begun, and he is approaching it with a new lens. He is particularly fascinated by how synthetic biology and artificial intelligence challenge basic assumptions about what it means to be human, and what regulations, if any, could help ensure that they are used for good.

In a conversation this September, Omeje spoke about what he’s looking to explore during his time at Cambridge, and how he plans to approach the technically and ethically complex topics of synthetic biology and artificial intelligence. (The following interview has been condensed and edited for length and clarity.)

Alex Ip: Tell us a little about what you’re working on.

Chikezie Omeje: Right now, I’m looking at synthetic biology and artificial intelligence. These two things have the capacity to change our world in a way that we’ve never thought of or witnessed in human history.

Alan Turing proposed that a computer will be assumed as “intelligent” when you can interact with the computer without knowing whether it’s computer or human. The large language models and chatbots we have now have passed the Turing test. What’s the implication of that?

And then there’s synthetic biology, the capacity to design and produce new organisms. If you’re religious, you believe that God created everything. But now we could even resurrect extinct organisms. These are things we’ve ascribed to a god, but now humans can do.

**Omeje** takes a photo of the horizon while aboard the Gemma during a KSJ trip to the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute.

AI: You mentioned how through AI and synthetic biology, humans have almost achieved a God-like state. Do you consider yourself religious? How has that influenced your approach?

CO: I’m a secular humanist. I believe that as humans, we don’t need help from anywhere outside our humanity to solve our challenges. That’s why I’m so enthusiastic about what we can achieve. The cluster of technologies around AI and synthetic biology will give us the capacity to change our world in whatever form we want. We know the principles, it’s just designing the technologies to get us there ASAP.

AI and synthetic biology are challenging our basic assumptions about what it means to be human, asking us to redefine our realities. I just want to understand what is going on here, the stages that we have reached, how this is going to define our future, and — looking at the changes past technologies have brought to the world — where we have opportunities to regulate these new technologies.

Given they are developing at a very alarming rate, you begin to wonder: How do we regulate these technologies? Is it even possible? If you want to regulate, whose regulations are we going to follow? Is it that of China, the U.S., or Nigeria? For the first time, we may not have a unified international framework for regulating this technology.

AI: What made AI and synthetic biology so difficult to regulate, unlike past technologies like weapons of mass destruction?

CO: Nuclear weapons weren’t just developed in somebody’s backyard or produced by just one private factory. The Manhattan Project, funded by the U.S. government, assembled the great scientists at the time to develop this weapon. If you look at other countries that have done it. Countries would come together and say, “We are going to destroy ourselves if we continue to develop. Let’s pause this and stop other countries from doing that.”

But AI development’s been driven mostly by the private sector. Thousands, if not millions of people, are pushing it at their own pace, trying to develop a different aspect of AI and applying it to different areas. Do you go and say, ‘Oh, this company, stop building AI tools, or, this other company, stop doing this?’ It’s not so centralized that authorities can just say, ‘Okay, stop.’

AI: Most people cannot obtain weapons-grade uranium, but many have computers in their homes.

CO: Exactly. And they have the software to run their code, the data to train their algorithms. If uranium is mined in a particular country, they can issue a moratorium. But in the case of AI, how do you stop it?

It’s the same with synthetic biology. If somebody wanted to develop an organism to clean up the plastics clogging our waterways, the tools to do so are not that expensive. Anybody who has the knowledge and skill will be able to do this in their houses, release some of these organisms, and start experimenting with them.

If you’ve seen the news, one Chinese scientist claimed to have edited the genomes of two embryos to make their genes HIV-resistant.

AI: Yes, he’s based in the city next to the one I grew up!

CO: In this case, we know it because it became news. What if somebody is in a private laboratory synthesizing different DNAs and trying to create exotic organisms? How do you know about those things? That’s the larger question.

The development of AI and synthetic biology is like a car set in motion without brakes on. These are the conversations we should be having and I think these conversations are already happening in most places around the world.

AI: What would a successful fellowship look like for you? How are you taking advantage of what Cambridge has to offer?

CO: I’m taking “Politics and Policies: What Is the Impact of Data and AI?”, taught by Deborah Hughes Hallett at Harvard. I’m also taking a course in synthetic biology taught by Ron Weiss. It’s not that I’m going to start designing genetic circuits for certain gene expressions. I see this as an opportunity to understand the basics, so that when you talk to the people developing these technologies, you know the kind of questions to ask that will inform your reporting.

At the end of the day, I’m a journalist, not a scientist. I don’t know if I’m in a place to tell you how these technologies will change everything, but I know that they have the potential to change a lot of things. The bottom line is good journalism. Let’s inform people adequately, so they can make decisions about themselves, about their community, and even put pressure on leaders to take certain actions.

Alex Ip is a student in the MIT Graduate Program in Science Writing and editor-in-chief of The Xylom magazine.

by Knight Science Journalism / May 24th 2023 / Fellowship Life

Meet the KSJ Fellows: Laura Bliss

Laura Bliss felt her share of anticipatory angst while she was waiting for her Knight Science Journalism Fellowship to begin. Selected in the spring of 2020 — just before the Covid-19 pandemic forced the fellowship program into a hiatus — the Bloomberg CityLab reporter had to endure a two-year wait before finally making the move to MIT.

That wait, she says, has made the fellowship experience that much sweeter. “I’ve tried to savor it like a piece of perfectly ripe fruit.”

Since arriving in Cambridge last fall, Bliss has been busy — discovering new scientific interests, immersing herself in research on invasive species, and even delivering a lecture at the historic Boston Public Library. Along the way, she’s formed new friends and found new perspective on her career.

KSJ recently interviewed Bliss about her fellowship experience and how it has helped her grow as a journalist. The interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

KSJ@MIT: You were named a Knight Science Journalism Fellow in the spring of 2020, but then, because of the Covid pandemic, you had to wait until the fall of 2022 to begin your fellowship. What was that wait like for you?

Laura Bliss: For me, in the scheme of things the pandemic disrupted, the wait for the fellowship was easy. Especially since the fellowship was never canceled, it was just delayed. It actually gave me something to look forward to during those long, uncertain months of lockdown and working from home: There was this gift of an experience waiting on the other side.

In the meantime, plenty of other stuff was going on. As part of my job at Bloomberg CityLab, I was busy reporting and editing stories about cities and the environment. I spent a week in Nevada following the epic 2020 ballot count as part of Bloomberg’s election team. I edited “The Quarantine Atlas,” a book of maps and essays about how Covid reshaped cities around the world. I reported and hosted a podcast called “Bedrock, USA,” which last month was nominated for a Webby Award. And two weeks before moving to Cambridge, I married my wonderful partner Alex (who accompanied me here and has had an absolute blast).

KSJ: As a fellow, you have a chance to explore a variety of topics by auditing classes at MIT and Harvard. Are there topics you weren’t reporting on before the fellowship that you’ve taken an interest in since coming to Cambridge?

LB: One of the best parts of this experience has been the time and support to follow my curiosity. That has absolutely led me to topics I wasn’t previously reporting on or thinking about. For example, last fall I followed [KSJ Fellow] Mary-Rose Abraham into an intriguing-sounding class at Harvard called “Animals in History.” Taught by the historian of science Janet Browne — who is as lovely and personable as she is brilliant and accomplished, who brought cookies to every class and is sadly retiring this year — the course surveyed how animals have been treated and imagined within (mostly) Western cultural traditions. We covered animals at zoos, animals in the lab, animals as companions, animals as nationalistic symbols, animals as characters in books and film, animals and the law. We explored fascinating linkages to histories of race and gender. My takeaway: Beliefs about animals have long been shaped by beliefs about other humans. Stumbling into that class actually proved formative to my research project.

I find the boll weevil fascinating as a story about the lengths we’ve gone as a country to control the natural environment in the name of profit, even as we’ve knowingly exacerbated environmental problems.

KSJ: Speaking of research projects, can you tell us about the project you’ve been working on this year?

LB: My project examines the cultural history of invasive species in the United States. This semester, I’ve been mainly focused on one in particular: the boll weevil. Native to Central America and Mexico, the boll weevil migrated into Texas in the 1890s and proceeded to eat its way up the entire Cotton Belt. This bug sent shockwaves through the South’s economy and culture that lasted for decades and in some ways are still unfolding. I find the boll weevil fascinating as a story about the lengths we’ve gone as a country to control the natural environment in the name of profit, even as we’ve knowingly exacerbated environmental problems. A more specific fun fact: Delta Airlines got its start in the aerial crop-dusting business, dumping tons of calcium arsenate on weevil-infested cotton fields in the 1920s. (This worked out well for Delta. The boll weevil kept rampaging.)

I’ll add that I changed project topics about nine times in the first few months of the fellowship. That’s a slight exaggeration, but only slight. Future fellows, don’t be afraid of letting curiosity be your guide!

KSJ: As you look back on your fellowship year so far, what are some of the highlights?

LB: There are so many. In March, I got to give a public talk about my book, “The Quarantine Atlas,” at the Boston Public Library. The writer Garnette Cadogan and artist Rajiv Raman then joined me for a panel discussion, and the audience asked great questions. A big group of friends came out in support, including my best friend who was visiting at the time, and we all went out for drinks afterwards. That night was so special. I also really enjoyed teaching a class during [MIT’s Independent Activities Period]. It was a three-day crash course about reporting on cities that brought together a super cool group of students from the urban planning and design programs at MIT and Harvard. They challenged me to think about journalism in new ways.

But the biggest highlight has been all the time spent with my cohort. First of all, we’ve become friends and hung out a lot outside of fellowship activities. Then there’s everything else. We were inspired week after week by seminars with writers, scientists, and academics. We learned new tips and tricks from brilliant journalists and practitioners like Duy Linh Tu and Ibby Caputo. We traveled together, including to Costa Rica, which was basically eight days of wildlife-sighting with a group of lovable nature dorks. What could be better? We even got to be here during KSJ’s 40th anniversary celebration. It was amazing to meet past generations of alums and hear how KSJ launched them on new paths. That helped me realize that while the fellowship might only last 10 months, its positive effects can ripple out for much longer.

It’s been a “fellowship” in the true sense of the word: an experience made and shared by peers and mentors.

KSJ: Do you feel this year at KSJ has helped you grow as a journalist?

LB: Absolutely. My path into journalism wasn’t the most traditional. I wasn’t the editor of my college newspaper, didn’t go to J-school, wasn’t born with a reporter’s notebook in hand. So even after almost a decade of working in big newsrooms like Bloomberg and the Atlantic, I always felt a bit of imposter syndrome. But this year — surrounded by my talented fellow fellows, the KSJ staff, and all the professors, writers, classmates, and other folks I’ve gotten to know — has been immensely validating. It made me think about my future in this business in a more expansive way. I feel part of a community of people working towards a common goal, friends I can call and lean on and to whom I can lend support. It’s been a “fellowship” in the true sense of the word: an experience made and shared by peers and mentors.

I wish I could stay forever, but I’m also excited to get back out there with new ideas and energy.

by Elizabeth Gamillo / December 16th 2022 / Fellowship Life

Meet the KSJ Fellows: Mary-Rose Abraham

When journalist Mary-Rose Abraham co-created the history podcast “Scrolls and Leaves” back in February 2020, she was doing more than narrating stories of the Indian subcontinent. She was chronicling colonialism, science, and culture through lesser-heard voices.

Each episode took the listener on an adventure: from the relics of an ancient trading port to Western appropriation of indigenous botanical knowledge to the discovery of undersea treasure. The stories may have been familiar to some, but the perspectives were new.

“We did a history podcast specifically because, especially in the Western world, you always hear the narrative from that perspective, right? We went and colonized X,” says Abraham. “Well, what about, What did X think about being colonized?”

It is a sensibility that has informed Abraham’s nearly two decades as a journalist — a career that has seen her produce stories for the likes of NPR, ABC News, and others. Through it all, Abraham has gravitated toward stories that amplify the voices and perspectives of people who society most often overlooks, and she has come to especially enjoy sharing those stories in the intimacy of audio. Now at MIT as a Knight Science Journalism Fellow, the multimedia journalist is turning her attention to a trio of issues that could loom large for decades to come: agriculture, food security, and climate change.

Abraham’s interest in journalism began after she was named co-editor of a small four-page newsletter at her middle school in Los Angeles, California. From there, she covered weighty stories for her high-school paper, including one about child abuse, and went on to intern at CNN during her senior year of college, at the University of California, Los Angeles. Afterward, she took on freelancing video and audio journalism projects for local cable stations and at NPR, and then did a masters in broadcast journalism at Columbia University. Soon after, she joined ABC News and eventually became a staff producer.

Then, in 2015, Abraham packed her things and moved to Bangalore, India. She says she was drawn to living outside the United States.

“I think when you go to a developing country, you see all the problems, but you also see progress and problem-solving at a whole different level than a developed nation like ours,” Abraham says.

During her time in India, Abraham worked as a freelancer for outlets such as NatGeo, the BBC, and The Guardian, often covering environmental stories. She wrote, for instance, about a flowering shrub — found exclusively in the Shola grasslands of South India’s Western Ghats mountains — that blooms once every 12 years and whose existence is threatened by shrinking habitat and agricultural practices.

Other stories were more devastating to cover, such as the story of a destructive wildfire near a small community in the Western Ghats , killing 23 trekkers. Reporting for the Undark podcast, Abraham interviewed the mother of one of the victims, as well as villagers who aided in rescue efforts and whose livelihoods were disrupted by the fire. The tragedy shed light on India’s failing wildfire monitoring systems and the pernicious consequences of laws and traditions that obstruct fire suppression.

“There’s a reason why you’re just like, I need to tell this story,” recalls Abraham. “And maybe, in this case, it was because that could have been me or any one of my friends. We go trekking all the time, and there’s so much that I could identify with.”

As the planet warms, climate change is not only heightening the risk of wildfire, it is also disrupting agricultural practices and altering global food supplies. During her time with the Knight Science Journalism Program, Abraham is hoping to better understand these threats through a deeply researched project. As in the past, she plans to incorporate a diverse set of voices, including indigenous communities who are directly affected.

“It’s that old saying of journalism, giving a voice to the voiceless,” Abraham says. “I think every journalist has a responsibility to seek out those people. And if they want to, they can share their story.”

Elizabeth Gamillo is a student in the MIT Graduate Program in Science Writing. She was previously a daily correspondent for Smithsonian and wrote for Science magazine as their 2018 AAAS Diverse Voices in Science Journalism Intern.

by Anna Blaustein / April 16th 2021 / Fellowship Life

With ‘Baseline,’ John Sutter Examines Climate Change Through a New Lens

Twenty-six years ago, marine biologist Daniel Pauly coined the term “shifting baseline syndrome” to describe how fishermen grew accustomed to catching ever smaller hauls as seas were depleted by overfishing. With each new generation of fishermen, the bounties that filled previous cohorts’ nets were largely forgotten. Scarcity that would have once seemed unimaginable became the “new normal.”

That shifting baseline effect is also evident in the way we perceive climate change: We often don’t fully grasp the scale of change because it unfolds so gradually. We grow used to the ever-encroaching tides, the frequent floods, the droughts.

John Sutter’s documentary project “Baseline” is an ambitious attempt to counter this tendency. Over the next three decades, Sutter will film from four sites at the forefront of the climate crisis: Shishmaref, Alaska, where melting sea ice and thawing permafrost are claiming lives and houses; a community in central Utah parched by intense drought; the storm-battered island of Dominica, in the Caribbean; and the Marshall Islands, a string of low-lying atolls threatened by sea levels rising at twice the global average rate. Each of the communities is a proxy for many more like them.

The project will consist not of a single documentary film but of many; Sutter plans to film in five installments from now until 2050, to document climate change’s gradual incursion into these places and the lives of the people who inhabit them. Think Michael Apted’s “Up” series, but for climate. “It’s my attempt — for myself and for other people — to try to rethink the way we conceptualize time in relation to the climate crisis,” Sutter says. “And to tell stories that cross decades, cross generations, and really try to make sense of the magnitude of what’s going on around us.”

Sutter has been drawn to stories about place since he was a child. He says that when he was growing up in Oklahoma, his grandmother would tell him stories about the Dust Bowl era of the 1930s. She described clouds of dirt that swirled thick in the air, blocking out the sun. “It just sounded truly apocalyptic,” Sutter recalls. He says those stories about the Dust Bowl, and the mass migration it engendered, likely contributed to his present-day fascination with narratives about communities impacted by climate change.

After attending college in Georgia, Sutter returned to Oklahoma, found work at The Oklahoman, and developed a penchant for telling environmental stories. He later joined CNN, where he worked as a senior investigative reporter, producer, and columnist for 10 years. There, too, he gravitated toward stories about people living in places threatened by environmental change. He covered climate migration from Honduras, the effects of coral bleaching on a fishing community in Madagascar, and Hurricane Maria’s impact on Puerto Rico.

John Sutter (right), field reporting in Honduras. Image credit: McKenna Ewen

He also wrote about Shishmaref, where longtime residents — most of them Alaska Natives — recently watched a home slump into the sea due to thawing permafrost. More houses are expected to follow.

Sutter says there’s real value in listening to people who are so tied to places — people who are finely attuned to the changes that are unfolding. They experience and understand climate change much more intimately than he can, Sutter says. That’s one reason that he and the “Baseline” team decided to supply children in each location with cameras, making them documentarians of their own.

The material the kids have captured “is among the most interesting stuff that we’ve found so far,” Sutter says. “I think that there’s something unique about seeing the world from a kid’s height and perspective, and some of them are really pretty stunning photographers.”

The first installment of the documentary series is in its early stages and, like so many other projects, has been delayed by the pandemic. But despite the project’s long timeline, Sutter operates with a sense of urgency. Communities are already feeling the effects of climate change, and the window of opportunity to convince world leaders to act on it is narrowing.

I asked Sutter what he expected the world would look like in 2050, when “Baseline” is wrapping up. He said he’s optimistic that the Biden administration will take aggressive action on climate. “But there’s a lot of inertia in the current system,” he added. “We’ve known essentially the same scary facts about climate science for a few decades now.”

Sutter says he has faith that humanity will find inventive ways to respond to the mounting climate threat but that, ultimately, he doesn’t know how things will unfold. And that, he says, is why he’s making the film.

Anna Blaustein is a research associate with the Knight Science Journalism Program and a student in the MIT Graduate Program in Science Writing. You can read more of her work at annablaustein.com and find her on Twitter @annablaustein.

by Zain Humayun / December 5th 2019 / Fellowship Life, KSJ News & Events

Meet This Year’s Fellows: Andrada Fiscutean

Fiscutean, a science and technology writer, is drawn to stories about “people with very few resources, building things out of thin air.”

Andrada Fiscutean can remember the families of Reghin, a small city in Romania, queuing in the streets for rations when she was a little girl in the late 1980s. After her family received their share, Fiscutean would cut back into line to stand with a neighbor. By pretending to be the neighbor’s daughter, she would help the person get a larger portion. Under Nicolae Ceausescu’s repressive regime, a little food went a long way.

Today Fiscutean is a Knight Science Journalism fellow at MIT and an award-winning science and technology writer. And though she’s far from the streets of Reghin, she still finds herself drawn to people who are trying to do more with less.

For 10 years before coming to MIT, Fiscutean rose at 5 a.m. She would commute from her home in Bucharest to the office of ProFM, the radio station where she is now editor-in-chief. After anchoring the morning news and coordinating projects with her editorial team, she’d return home and immerse herself in her writing projects. It was a workload that would have overwhelmed a less industrious writer.

Fiscutean, at a cybersecurity conference in Romania.

But perseverance has been a recurring motif in Fiscutean’s life. It’s mirrored in remarkably researched stories about a North Korean biologist who worked as a dietician for Kim Il-sung, a group of Romanian students who hacked into the Pentagon, and patients who received fecal transplants when antibiotics didn’t work. At university, Fiscutean acquired computer science expertise, which she wears lightly, writing with deceptive clarity on cyberattacks and machine learning techniques.

When Fiscutean does foray into complex territory, she does so with a storyteller’s instincts. Although her interest in the human experience might seem out of place amid the abstractions of computer science, Fiscutean doesn’t see an inconsistency. In a piece she’s particularly fond of, she wrote about Romanian undergraduates in the 1980s who built Cobra computers out of smuggled parts.

“When you look at how the Cobra computer was built, you get to learn a lot about the people who built it and the decisions that they made. It tells you a lot about society,” Fiscutean says.

In 1989, Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife were executed in the Romanian Revolution. (Fiscutean was four years old.) In recent years, Romania’s technology industry has been undergoing a quiet revolution of its own. The country’s computer scientists have come a long way.

So has Fiscutean. As a young technology writer in Romania, she had few role models, and largely had to find her own way. Today, she finds joy in mentoring young journalists. In the meantime, she continues to look for stories about “people with very few resources, building things out of thin air.”

“This is where you’re going to find the best story,” she says. “Not in a person that has everything and creates everything, but in a person who has nothing, and manages to do something.”

This is the third in a series of profiles of the 2019-20 Knight Science Journalism fellows, written by students in MIT’s Graduate Program in Science Writing.

by Brittany Flaherty / May 3rd 2019 / Fellowship Life, KSJ News & Events

This Year’s Fellows: Lisa De Bode

The veteran journalist and Belgium native has been exploring the ways that bodies and minds respond to violence.

When Lisa De Bode worked as a reporter covering public health in New York City, she turned her attention to a problem that society often overlooks: homeless women’s menstrual health and the challenges they face to access feminine hygiene products. Women are the fastest growing group among the homeless, says De Bode, who wrote about the issue in a series of pieces for Al Jazeera America. On an average night in New York City, she says, around 4,600 women will sleep in a shelter.

“Gendered ideas really influence the way we make policy. We don’t think to donate or provide pads and tampons because the stereotype of a homeless person is a man under a bridge,” said De Bode. “Fortunately, my editors were very supportive.”

De Bode’s work spurred a wave of donations and kindled discussions and advocacy that ultimately led to new legislation guaranteeing free access to feminine hygiene products for women in New York City’s shelters, prisons, and public schools. Her work continues to influence policy in cities across the world and restore dignity to women’s bodies, she says.

Health and politics are recurring themes in De Bode’s writing. “I’m very interested in how individuals cope with change and trauma—of war, terrorism, immigration, climate change, and domestic violence,” she said. She recalls profiling a Native American veteran who did two tours in Iraq and had severe post-traumatic stress disorder. “She dealt with this by turning to traditional dance from the tribe she belongs to, drawing on long traditions of healing. Sometimes the way medicine is approached is not what people need to cope.”

Initially drawn to medicine herself, De Bode completed one year of medical school at the University of Leuven in her native Belgium—the same university where, in the early 15th century, Andreas Vesalius gathered corpses before he wrote “De humani corporis fabrica,” his groundbreaking books on human anatomy. But De Bode became increasingly drawn to a different path—dissecting truth instead of bodies.

“Examining the physiology of a person is interesting, but I felt strongly that there were more dimensions to people to explore,” said De Bode. “I wanted to know the bigger story behind what I was learning.”

De Bode soon completed graduate programs in economics and politics and became fluent in four languages (Spanish, French, English, and her native Dutch) and knowledgeable of two others (Arabic and German). She applied her linguistic abilities working as a staff reporter covering public health for Al Jazeera America in New York and as a field producer covering terrorism at CNN in Brussels.

At CNN, she covered advocacy efforts led by mothers of foreign fighters based in Brussels. De Bode also was the writer of “EUROPA, An Illustrated Introduction to Europe for Migrants and Refugees,” a collaborative guidebook that was awarded the 2018 Royal Photographic Society’s Hood Medal.

Before coming to Cambridge, De Bode traveled widely as a freelance reporter for stories published in places like The Atlantic, The Nation, and The Village Voice. She garnered numerous awards and fellowships along the way, including a 2014 Sigma Delta Chi Award for best non-deadline reporting.

This year, De Bode leveraged her Knight Science Journalism Fellowship at MIT to further explore ways that bodies and minds respond to violence.

“My fellowship looks at how our bodies yield to power but also resist the demands of our time, language, and culture,” said De Bode. “My journalism explores how we build community, and improve the worlds we live in.”

This is the tenth in a series of profiles of the 2018-19 Knight Science Journalism fellows, written by students in MIT’s Graduate Program in Science Writing.