fellow profiles Archives - Page 2 of 2 - Knight Science Journalism @MIT

by Eva Frederick / May 1st 2019 / Fellowship Life, KSJ News & Events

This Year’s Fellows: Amina Khan

The LA Times reporter has been exploring ways to encourage science literacy by harnessing people’s natural curiosity about the origins of life.

It took Amina Khan almost a decade to find her perfect journalistic niche. After cutting her teeth as an opinion writer for her high-school and college newspapers, the Northern California native tried on a medley of job titles: She was an editorial intern and web assistant at the LA Times, she wrote for Forbes, and then she returned to the LA Times, where she began to cycle through beats. When she finally landed at the newspaper’s Science and Health desk, she knew she was home.

“I loved it,” she recalls. “I got to write about dinosaurs and all these interesting things, and I got to talk to people who actually wanted to talk to me — people who were either changing the world or changing the way that we saw the world.”

Khan has now been at the LA Times for nearly nine years. She describes herself as a generalist: She’s written about climate change, Mars rovers, a three-year-old boy undergoing a risky surgery to regain his hearing, and more.

But Khan’s most ambitious project fell into her lap out of the blue — specifically, the cerulean blue of Twitter. In 2012 a publishing editor, who would later become her agent, direct messaged her and asked her if she wanted to write a book. She accepted the offer and wrote “Adapt,” a book that explores the ways humans can solve problems by learning from biological systems. For example, sea creatures hold clues for designing medical devices that work inside the salty, watery environment of the human body; termites, one of nature’s most dynamic architects, offer lessons on efficient construction.

In 2017, Khan took a brief leave to write for the Netflix series Bill Nye Saves the World. “[It] was a totally different way of looking at writing and thinking about writing,” she remembers. “You’re sitting around a table with other writers and … you talk a lot about structure. You spend like 80 percent of your time talking and 20 percent of it writing.”

During her nine months as a KSJ fellow, Khan has been exploring ways to encourage literacy on basic scientific topics by harnessing people’s natural curiosity about the origins of life on Earth and the possibility of life on other planets.

“I’m trying to use astrobiology as an educational prism to make people who love reading about that stuff learn more of that basic science and chemistry that they missed in high school,” she said. “I want to bring that sort of that basic science literacy up by engaging people in a subject that they find inherently fascinating.”

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

by Eva Frederick / April 29th 2019 / Fellowship Life, KSJ News & Events

This Year’s Fellows: Magnus Bjerg

Bjerg, who heads an award-winning digital team at Denmark’s TV 2, has been investigating how developers and journalists can better collaborate.

“I noticed her immediately, but she probably best remembers me for sitting on a paper cup of coffee,” says Magnus Bjerg of his first encounter with Christina Andreasen, at a workshop for the Danish Online News Association. Despite the coffee mishap, the two digital journalists hit it off and soon began dating. Three years later, they are a Danish journalism power couple: Andreasen, a digital editor at the Danish paper Berlingske, is a Nieman Fellow at Harvard; Bjerg is a Knight Science Journalism Fellow at MIT.

“We never dreamed that it could be a possibility for us both to get a fellowship at the same time,” he says. “I love that we get the opportunity to do this together.”

For Bjerg, the road to Cambridge began in Allerød, Denmark, the mid-sized town outside of Copenhagen where he grew up. Although he admired scientists and engineers, his combined hunger for learning and love of storytelling drew him to journalism. After graduating from the Danish School of Journalism in 2010, he took a job as a radio reporter for a station called DR P4 Bornholm on the island of Bornholm, a Baltic Sea paradise of rocky cliffs, green fields, and timber framed houses. Later, he was hired by the tabloid Ekstra Bladet, Denmark’s most viewed news site. There, he discovered how journalists can use programming and interactive experiences to add perspective to a story that can’t be captured with words alone.

For the past six years Bjerg has been doing digital journalism for TV 2, Denmark’s largest news broadcaster. There he started an editorial development team that is now made up of developers, graphic designers, and journalists. Constantly innovating, the team won five digital awards in 2017, including honors from the Society for News Design Scandinavia and the Association of Danish Media.

“I like to think of [the team] as a producing innovation lab,” Bjerg said. “It’s the most fun, creative and always-evolving place to be in Danish news.”

Over the course of his fellowship at MIT, Bjerg has been investigating how developers and journalists can better collaborate. He acknowledges an inherent tension between the two camps: It’s the nature of the news industry to produce content quickly, in order to keep up with the blistering pace of current events, while the process of creating interactives and graphics tends to be slower. Bjerg hopes to return to TV 2 with a set of guidelines to facilitate this interaction.

“I am a really strong believer that when we cross-pollinate our different specialties, we can do much more than we can do apart,” he said. ”Digital journalism used to be an image and some text, but there is so much more now, and we have to keep experimenting to stay ahead and evolve.”

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

by Diego Arenas / March 19th 2019 / Fellowship Life, KSJ News & Events

This Year’s Fellows: Talia Bronshtein

Bronshtein, an award-winning data journalist, thinks decentralized technologies may one day revolutionize everything from medical records to journalism.

Talia Bronshtein has always had an affinity for numbers. The economist-turned-journalist can remember competing in math competitions in her home country of Russia as a teenager. A first-place finish in the Regional Russian Olympiad of Kursk won her an exemption from university admission exams and paved her way to college. There, she channeled her passion for statistics and mathematical modeling toward economics. She later earned a PhD in economics, began teaching, and — at 28 years of age — became the youngest female university department chair in Central Russia.

Ten years ago, however, her career path took a turn. She came to the U.S. as a Fulbright Scholar and conducted postdoctoral research at the Brandeis International Business School. From there, she joined an international consulting company, researching emerging markets in former Soviet republics. Bronshtein excelled at analyzing and visualizing data for colleagues, students, and clients alike. Mining through hefty sets of data was not a chore but a thrill. “I found that there was so much data available — reliable data — compared to the former USSR countries, where it is either not available or cannot be trusted,” she says. “Here, I was blown away that I could get my hands on almost any dataset and dig into it without worrying about being prosecuted.”

Bronshtein embraced data journalism and ended up as an interactives editor at STAT, a Boston-based media company covering stories about health, medicine, and scientific discovery. She’s produced striking data visualizations, ranging from a team-by-team look at concussions in the NFL to an interactive map showing the global spread of Zika virus over time. She was featured in the anthology Best American Infographics 2016 for her visualization of 200 years of immigration to the U.S. And she contributed to an investigation into clinical trial reporting failures that was cited by Vice President Joe Biden.

Bronshtein’s visualizations give viewers a macroscopic look at trends that might otherwise remain hidden in databases of seemingly endless figures and numbers — and they provide enough quantitative detail to satiate the most curious of readers. She believes that data visualizations have the power to illuminate almost any subject and transcend cultural and language barriers to reach an international audience.

Now, as a Knight Science Journalism fellow at MIT, Bronshtein is studying the emerging yet underreported subject of decentralized technologies, which she thinks may one day revolutionize everything from medical records and financial systems to journalism. “I want to educate the general public about the mathematical and technical side of these innovations. It’s not just about Bitcoin or cryptocurrencies — I want to cut through the existing hype and focus on groundbreaking work that has the greatest potential to change society.”

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

by Gina Vitale / November 19th 2018 / Fellowship Life

This Year’s Fellows: Pakinam Amer

The Nature Middle East Editor wants to use virtual reality to help people understand today’s scientific issues.

Every journalist discovers their passion at a different age. Pakinam Amer started younger than most — she was only 11 when she decided to create a magazine in her home in Cairo, Egypt. She recalls writing out every article by hand, slowly and neatly, so that the photocopies made for friends and family would look as professional as possible.

At the urging of her parents, Amer studied math in high school, and later began college at the American University in Cairo as a physics major. However, she didn’t stay on that track for long — enticed once more by writing and current affairs, she switched to journalism.

She graduated in spring of 2004 with a bachelor’s in journalism and a minor in psychology. She stayed at the university to begin a master’s in TV journalism, but she soon found that she preferred the field to the classroom. After a six-month internship at the Associated Press and several years at Cairo-based newspapers and wire services, Amer returned to graduate school with a Chevening scholarship to complete a master’s in Investigative Journalism at City, University of London.

Both during and after the program, Amer carried out investigative work for several Cairo-based magazines and newspapers. She says that work felt important — when teenagers were massacred in a drive-by church attack, for instance, the story needed to be told. Eventually, though, the darkness she witnessed became overwhelming.

“There is this saying — you stare into the abyss, and the abyss starts staring back after a certain point. And I felt I was on the precipice of that,” she says.

By the time Amer completed an award-winning investigative report on a missing Egyptian journalist, the glare of the abyss had become untenable. Amer submitted her resignation from Egypt Today. She considered a position at Nature Middle East, the regional edition of Nature magazine, but ultimately felt she needed time away from news reporting altogether.

She went to study Kung Fu in a Shaolin temple in China, intending to stay for only a month or so. But she stayed for a year. When she returned, she knew she wanted to reinvent herself. She had wrestled with enough darkness.

Nature Middle East reached out again. The position for an assistant editor had re-opened. Though she hadn’t become a full-fledged Zen Buddhist, it sure felt like a sign from the universe.

Within a year, she felt at home at Nature Middle East. Her knack for journalism melded with her childhood interest in science, and she rose to deputy editor and then editor-in-chief. The importance of the work was still present. The abyss, less so.

After coming across an award-winning VR experience in which the user is able to experience the growth and life of a tree — including the turmoils of forest fires and deforestation — Amer was determined to incorporate such technology in the newsroom. What better way to make people understand the scientific issues of today than to give them a way to experience them firsthand? During her year as a Knight Science Journalism Fellow, she aims to begin turning this idea into a reality.

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

by Devi Lockwood / October 17th 2018 / Fellowship Life, KSJ News & Events

This Year’s Fellows: Jason Dearen

“Nothing feels better than when your story holds up under scrutiny.”

Awards are great, but Jason Dearen is most proud of the time his writing got a man out of jail. In 2005, Dearen published a series of articles for the Oakland Tribune investigating the case of Matthew Deger, a schizophrenic patient caught in a year-long holding pattern in the San Mateo County Jail — despite not having been convicted of a crime. After reading Dearen’s articles, Superior Court Judge Mark Forcum released Deger and sent him to a state hospital for treatment.

“That felt good,” Dearen says, “and his family was really thankful.”

It wasn’t the last time Dearen’s pen would serve as an instrument of change. His 2009 story on mercury contamination from abandoned mines in central California resulted in the EPA adding the New Idria Mercury Mine to the superfund list. His 2013 investigation into fracking off the coast of California prompted the EPA to institute new reporting requirements for offshore fracking in California.

“Nothing feels better than when your story holds up under scrutiny,” Dearen said. “It holds up, and it changes things.”

Much of Dearen’s reporting has centered on the environment, an interest he traces back to his days growing up surfing in L.A. in the 1980s. He’d often take the bus to the beach, his surfboard in tow. In those days of lax regulation, he recalls, the water was frequently contaminated. On bad days, the air was beige soup. Most days you couldn’t see the mountains surrounding the city.

“I felt disgusted that these things I liked to do––be outside and be in the water––were being hampered by industry,” he said.

After finishing high school, Dearen went to San Francisco State University, where he worked as a clerk at the San Francisco Bay Guardian. The first in his family to go to college, he graduated and joined internet startup Yack.com as a content developer. But when the dot-com boom went belly up in the early 2000s, he applied to Columbia University and moved to NYC to pursue a master’s in journalism.

Most recently, Dearen has worked as a Florida-based correspondent at the Associated Press. He says the last two years there have been intense: He reported on the sinking of El Faro, the inundation of toxic waste sites during two hurricanes, the Parkland shooting, the shooting at Pulse night club, and executions. “That was a lot of death and destruction,” he said.

In Cambridge, Dearen is looking forward to having a break from the chaos. During his time as a Knight Science Journalism fellow, he’ll work on a longform narrative: a medical mystery about a lethal fungal outbreak among patients who had been injected with contaminated pain drugs. His story will take readers inside the process of how doctors and scientists uncovered the outbreak.

When he’s not writing, Dearen plays guitar. He was in a San Francisco punk band called the Young Offenders, which called it quits in 2012. As he sees it, both songwriting and journalism are a storytelling process. “You’re either using words or music to tell a story and try to bring people along with you on a journey,” Dearen says.

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