Interviews Archives - Knight Science Journalism @MIT

by Lucie McCormick / May 8th 2026 / Fellowship Life

Leslye Davis on the Power of Visual Storytelling

Leslye Davis calls herself “medium agnostic.” Since starting her career as a visual journalist at the New York Times, she has worked across photo and print journalism, as well as short and long-form video. “I always try to just work in the medium that’s best for the story,” she says.

Now an independent journalist and filmmaker, Davis is finding satisfaction telling stories around mental health and income inequality, and translating complicated ideas for the general public. She grew up in rural Kentucky and witnessed firsthand how addiction and mental illness can impact a community or place. Her feature film “Father Soldier Son,” released on Netflix in 2020, tells the story of a multigenerational military family in rural America that is grappling with their commitment to service, and the mental toll that can accompany it.

I recently sat down with Davis to talk about her work. In our conversation, she described the immense responsibility she feels toward the people who entrust her with their stories, and she emphasized the value she places on people’s time –– whether it’s a person taking the time to open up about their lives, or a scientist taking the time to explain the nitty-gritty of their work.

We also discussed the changing landscape of visual storytelling, her deepening interest in income inequality, and how she sees her role as a journalist reporting on sensitive topics. Our conversation, below, has been edited for length and clarity.

Lucie McCormick: Do you remember when you first picked up a camera, what about it felt good to you?

Leslye Davis: I was in the yearbook in high school. My yearbook advisor was then, and remains today, one of my mentors. She taught me how to take pictures, she loaned me her camera for two years, and then at her recommendation I decided to apply for the photojournalism major at Western Kentucky University.

I just remember the very first time I shot video, I was like, This is my medium.

I can be really extroverted, but I can also be really shy and nervous. So it gave me a purpose to go places I wouldn’t go –– I think that’s a very common thing for people who are drawn to the medium. It was also a buffer. I feel everything more intensely than I wish, and it gives you a way to process something through a medium, as opposed to feeling deluged by what’s unfolding.

I process things for a long time. I chew on stuff. The work gives me a way to make that productive, because otherwise I think that could easily be a really counterproductive way of moving through the world.

LM: Have there been projects that were particularly impactful for you, or that changed how you approach storytelling?

LD: There’s a project that I was a small part of a very large team, called “Who Gets to Breathe Clean Air in New Delhi.” That’s one of the collaborations I’m most proud to have been a part of. And I feel full pride over it, even though I’m like one twentieth of that team… so many of us [worked] together to make that what it became. I felt like it did justice in some way to the bigness of this issue, and the nuance of explaining why two people living in the same city that has the same air can have different life expectancies.

Davis filming on location during a winter shoot. (Credit: Steven Vanmaele)

And then in terms of just storytelling, I reported on the Afghanistan War for years, in a number of different ways. I think that just as a human, that work — and speaking with people affected by that conflict — helped me to understand my role as a human in the world more. I really appreciate that about that work. It’s hard given what’s happening right now in the world. It feels like history’s repeating itself.

LM: What is the difference you feel between working on something that’s visual or text driven, or long-form versus short-form?

LD: I think another word for what I do would actually be translation, because I’m really medium agnostic. I don’t really care if it’s audio, photo, video, print, maps. I like working in every medium and just telling stories. How do you best translate something that’s intellectually or emotionally complicated to people that are already really taxed? I ask myself that question and then try to just work in the medium that’s best for the story.

In terms of time scale, I really, really like the delayed gratification of slow projects — things that take a long time — because they allow you to you witness change. The story is almost never what you thought it was when you started.

At the same time, I really like the short-term gratification of having smaller pieces publish, because when you have projects that are big and long term and ambitious, you do start to wonder: Am I the kind of person that closes? Do I finish my work? Or am I somebody with a bunch of open projects? [And] the time and energy that the person I’ve been documenting gave me hangs heavy over me. But I have, at a certain point, I proved to myself that I do –– I’m a closer.

LM: You’ve said that every story comes down to science. Can you talk about that a little bit?

LD: There is science at the root of every story I think that I’ve ever worked on — it depends on whether or not you’re going to try to illuminate it in some way that is technical.

If people are generous enough with their time and their experiences, a story will unfold in an emotional way. But to explain something that maybe the world can’t see very easily; there is so much invisible science happening around us all the time.

I reported on a gun shop once — a store that was geographically between Columbine and the Batman theater shooting. … I went to this gun shop, and they were explaining hollow-point bullets to me, and the difference between a hollow-point bullet and just a normal bullet. That’s a scientific thing, the impact it has on the body…. You can understand why shootings in the U.S. are so much more catastrophic than in other places.

Ultimately, when you can make data relatable or you can translate it well, it’s really emotional actually. It’s more emotional than just seeing someone cry.

Ultimately, when you can make data relatable or you can translate it well, it’s really emotional actually. It’s more emotional than just seeing someone cry.

LM: Is there a topic that you want to keep working on?

LD: Income inequality is a current underlying everything I’m interested in –– and the deepening wealth divide. And it’s connected to every story in the world right now. As we become more technologically advanced, I think it will become more connected to the stories in this country.

Also, mental illness. I’m really interested in advancements in medicine in the brain. So much of the clinical solution work that exists for people struggling with mental illness or depression or schizophrenia or bipolar is arcane. I wonder: Are we gonna look back and be like, Whoa, we just had them try stuff and saw what happened? That’s wild!

Anything I can do to help illuminate that science or make it more human — you know, help a healthcare professional see the effect of their work in a large setting — I’m really interested in that.

LM: So what do you think is next?

LD: I want to find ways to collaborate in teams as a freelancer. And I want to continue to do projects that are both big and small. And also to continue to teach. I volunteer to coach at Mountain Workshops as often as they’ll have me. I love teaching young people from rural settings how to tell stories. I think it’s more important right now than ever; everybody’s engaging much more with stories than they ever have before. I ask myself what I can do to help diversify the sources of those stories, and to give young people the same gift I’ve had in seeing visual reporting as a way—maybe one of the best ways—to make a living.

Lucie McCormick is a documentary filmmaker, an astrophotographer, and a current student in MIT’s Graduate Program in Science Writing. Her reporting focuses on the intersections of science and social issues.

by Zoe Beketova / April 22nd 2026 / Fellowship Life

Sara Reardon, On Covering Science Policy From Obama to Trump

It didn’t take long after Trump’s second presidential inauguration for Sara Reardon to find herself back on the policy beat. Over her 15-year journalism career, Reardon — who once dreamed of being a neuroscientist — has chased stories from Capitol Hill to Montana, covering subjects spanning health policy, brain research, the environment, and more. She has worked both as a staff reporter — at Nature, Science, and New Scientist — and as a freelancer, writing for publications like KFF Health News, Scientific American, and Alzforum.

Reardon has covered policy under four vastly different administrations, but she recalls those first months covering the second Trump administration as especially challenging, filled with uncertainty, misinformation, and sourcing difficulties. Frequently, the worlds of politics and research collided, such as when she reported that the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, had made misleading claims about the money it was saving through its cuts to biomedical research.

I sat down with Reardon, who is now spending the year at MIT as a Knight Science Journalism Fellow, and we spoke about the pressures of covering science in ever-changing political landscapes, the challenges of reporting on agencies that spread misinformation, and the importance of reporting with rigor in the face of uncertainty.

Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Zoe Beketova: Over your career as a journalist, you’ve reported both as a staff member in newsrooms, and as a freelancer. What were the main differences you experienced between the positions? Did you prefer one over the other?

Sara Reardon: I was in newsrooms for a long time before I freelanced, and what was cool about that was there was camaraderie. I’ve worked with amazing people and had really close relationships with my editors. You get to know what they like, what they don’t like. I think a negative about freelancing is that when you’re on staff, you do your daily news, but you also have some time to develop long stories that are something you’re interested in. As a freelancer, your time is your money, right?

The pro of freelance, though, is you’re not beholden to one editor. I can just turn around and give my pitch to someone else if one editor doesn’t want it. There’s a lot of flexibility. I can go skiing in the morning and write in the afternoon. I schedule my interviews just around what I want to do. You get to write in a lot of different styles and for a lot of different people.

You had to be a little bit more careful about who’s telling you things. What do they stand to gain when you can’t put their name on it?

ZB: You’ve also reported on science under multiple different administrations, from Obama to Trump. What kinds of similarities and differences have you seen in terms of topics of coverage?

SR: I started covering policy under the Obama administration. There are so many different offices across way more agencies than you would think that have some sort of finger in biomedical research, including the White House. It was good to see how the sausage gets made, and then Trump came in, and you get to see how the sausage gets unmade. I think biomedical research wasn’t high on the priority list during the first Trump administration, so what I did a lot was covering the impacts of other things that were affecting science. A lot on shutting down immigration from Muslim countries and how much that was affecting research: science reporting, but through that lens.

ZB: What unique challenges did you face, and continue to face now, in covering the Trump administration’s impact on science?

SR: It was really hard to cover the first few months of NIH because I was getting a lot of anonymous sources. That brought about a lot of reporting challenges because you have to verify who they are, what they’re talking about. They’re all suspicious of not just me but of each other. And there’s these mass firings going on, so it was impossible to get any sort of information while having to protect people’s identities. That was a bit of a journalistic crisis. You had to be a little bit more careful about who’s telling you things. What do they stand to gain when you can’t put their name on it? How much of my time should be spent checking whether this is actually happening or not?

ZB: As a journalist, how do you think the media can help rebuild public trust in science?

SR: Honestly, I’m not sure. I mean, what we have been doing is our jobs. We have been verifying things, taking the time to make sure that we have multiple sources for information or named sources, which is best journalistic practice. You don’t report on rumors, you put things in the correct context and give everyone the chance to tell their side of the story. I think a lot of it is going to come down to generational change, to education. Something that we, as the media, need to keep in mind is that it’s more important than ever that we get things right, and that we don’t spread misinformation unknowingly, that we don’t try and be first instead of being right.

You’re not doing it for yourself. You’re not doing it for your sources. You have a duty to your sources, but ultimately, your duty is to your readers and to the publication.

ZB: Can you share a specific example of how you’ve covered misinformation about science?

SR: So, DOGE was tweeting up a storm about how much money they were saving, and they had this whole website that was the running tally of thousands of grants they’d canceled and how much they’d saved. And it was very clear to me, just knowing the NIH and knowing how grants work, that they don’t just hand you a check for 1.4 million dollars. Instead, they give you 140,000 dollars per year for ten years. So that money has mostly already been spent when you look at the dates of the research — some of the grants were about to run out. Even so, I was kind of surprised that no one had done this, gone through and figured out how much are they saying they’re saving versus how much is really being saved.

I contacted DOGE a couple of days before we were going to run the story like, hey, what’s up here? And I don’t know if it was because of my contact or something else, but they changed the website right before we were about to run the story to say, here’s the total amount of the grant, here’s how much has been spent. They basically added a column. The website was still unsearchable and downloadable. It was incredibly hard to use, which I think is deliberate, honestly.

ZB: Do you have any advice for other journalists who are covering science in today’s politicized atmosphere?

SR: I think it’s something that you really have to love. This is not a job anyone does for money. You have to, and I’m really bad about this, develop a thick skin for criticism — people being mad at you and you may or may not have done anything wrong. And remembering kind of why you’re doing it, that you’re doing it for the readers. You’re not doing it for yourself. You’re not doing it for your sources. You have a duty to your sources, but ultimately, your duty is to your readers and to the publication.

Zoe Beketova is a master’s student in MIT’s Graduate Program in Science Writing. Outside of MIT, she reports on mental and public health systems.

by R. M. Davis / December 14th 2020 / Alumni News

Rod McCullom on Finding a Beat — and Finding the Courage To Stand Out

Rod McCullom has learned many lessons throughout his journalism career, but he says one of the most important came from the late David Gay — an old mentor from his time at NBC Chicago, and one of the few other Black faces in what was a mostly White newsroom. “He told me to always work with the best,” McCullom said, “and he told me to find something difficult to specialize in.”

That was more than two decades ago. In the years that followed, McCullom would take Gay’s advice to heart, eventually leaving behind the bustle of broadcast newsrooms to strike out on his own, initially as a freelance health reporter. He quickly filled his portfolio with clips from outlets like The Atlantic, Scientific American, and The Nation. His lifelong passion for science and technology subjects helped him develop a reputation for sophisticated reporting on complex issues like addiction and HIV/AIDS — far from “easy A” subject matter.

In 2015, McCullom spent a year at MIT as a Knight Science Journalism Fellow, where he broadened his reporting interests to include topics like biometrics, cognitive science, AI, and the science of crime and violence. This year, as the Covid-19 pandemic brought health disparities to the fore and police killings sparked a summer of racial reckoning, McCullom’s reporting has taken on even greater relevance. In a recent interview, he spoke with me about the importance of finding the right beat, and having the courage to stand out from the crowd. (The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.)

R. M. Davis: You’ve built an impressive freelance career covering what at first blush seem like some very disparate topics — from AI technology to medicine to the science of violence and trauma. How do you think about your reporting beat, and how did your personal and professional experiences lead you to these topics?

Rod McCullom: I’ve always been interested in science and technology. When I worked in television, I was often a producer on health and technology stories, because other people in the newsroom didn’t understand them. I became fascinated by the question of why racial disparities were coming up in all these different stories — breast cancer mortality, cell phone usage uptake, things like that.

Over the years, I started to see that there were scientific reasons for these disparities, and I began to look at research that tried to explain or at least investigate them. Eventually, that led me to branch out into topics like biometrics and AI, trauma and violence, medicine, health, and technology. I’m always looking for research and stories that center on racial disparities, and I try to amplify the research and the stories that are already out there, because I don’t see a lot of people reporting on them.

RMD: Reading your work, it’s clear that you almost always try to bring an intersectional perspective to your storytelling, often using the lens of race or poverty to examine issues in science and technology. Why is that a priority for you?

RM: I think an intersectional framework can only make a story more interesting and more robust. For example, earlier this year I wrote a story on racial disparities in the Covid-19 pandemic. I started writing it around March or April when we were first getting into pandemic mode here in the U.S. At the time, the guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was that if you thought you had Covid, you weren’t supposed to go to the hospital and you weren’t supposed to ask for a test. You were supposed to call your doctor.

I remember hearing that on television, and I immediately knew it would be a problem because a very large percentage of African Americans do not have personal physicians. You see similar numbers for Latinos as well, and maybe even higher among other groups like Native Americans. Obviously I’m a Black man, and I have many other identities as well. I just feel that having that intersectional background, having those lived experiences, gives me a vantage point into research and reporting that many other people don’t have. I feel it’s only a positive—that it makes my work distinctive.

RMD: How does one know when they’ve found the right beat?

RM: I think it takes people a while. Sometimes you can find these things early in life. Sometimes you discover it later. It’s like finding that perfect sweater where every time you put it on, it just feels good. It fits right, you know?

It’s important to choose something that you’re passionate about—something that you either understand or that you’re willing to learn about. You also shouldn’t be afraid to be different. That’s what will make you distinctive and make your work stand out. You’ll become an authority on certain matters. If there’s a story, or if there’s a research pipeline that you’ve been following for months or years, you’ll do a much better job on it than someone who just dives right in.

I think the fear of being different is an issue for many writers and journalists; they’re afraid to move out of the pack. They start writing think pieces because everyone else is writing think pieces. They start pitching Bluetooth stories because everyone else is writing Bluetooth stories. I’ve learned that it’s better to stand out of the pack, to carve out a distinctive beat for yourself and not be distracted by what others are doing.

RMD: But it takes a certain amount of courage to do that, to stand apart from the pack. How have you found that courage? Is it just part and parcel of who you are, or is it a quality that you’ve developed over time?

RM: I think this goes back to what we were discussing earlier, just in terms of my own lived experiences. I dealt with a lot of challenges as a preteen and teenager. There was a lot of stress. There was a lot of physical abuse, and that made me sort of go into a shell. It also caused a lot of other lingering effects — physical, mental, emotional as well. Of course, as I grew into a young man and learned to stand on my own, I also learned how to address that trauma. A big part of that was learning to have confidence in myself.

That’s really important because I think, as Black people especially, we’re constantly beaten down. We’re beaten down our whole lives. Teachers respond to us differently when we’re little kids. As teenagers, we get stopped by the police. That sort of mistreatment follows you to college experiences, to work experiences. We’re constantly being beaten down, and I had to learn to be proud of who I am. I think for many of us, it takes a long time, but I really am proud of who I am and who I’ve become.

Ultimately, that’s why I’m not afraid to do something different, in terms of my beat. I feel that all my experiences contribute to who I am today, and to my reporting as well. It took me some years to become comfortable with who I am, and comfortable with standing out, so I deliberately do it now. It took me some years to get to that point, but once you have that confidence, it never leaves you.

R.M. Davis is a research associate with the Knight Science Journalism Program and a student at the MIT Graduate Program in Science Writing.

Rod McCullom writes the Convictions column for Undark Magazine.