Knight Science Journalism fellows Archives - Knight Science Journalism @MIT

by Knight Science Journalism / July 27th 2022 / Fellowship Life, KSJ News & Events

KSJ Welcomes Seven Journalists to Cambridge, Marking Return of In-Person Fellowships

Over the coming weeks, a cadre of elite science journalists will converge on Cambridge to embark on a year of learning, research, and project work as fellows in MIT’s Knight Science Journalism Program. Their arrival marks the highly anticipated return of KSJ’s in-person fellowships, after a two-year hiatus during which the program offered only remote project fellowships due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

Five mid-career journalists — Mary-Rose Abraham, Laura Bliss, Wojtek Brzezinski, Sébastien Malo, and Kelly Servick — will spend the year at MIT pursuing in-depth journalism projects, taking courses at local universities, and participating in seminars, workshops, and science-related field trips. They’ll be joined by early career journalists Ambar Castillo and Brittany Trang — this year’s Sharon Begley Science Reporting Fellows — who will take part in KSJ programming while also serving apprenticeships at STAT, the award-winning Boston-based biomedical magazine.

The fellowship year officially kicks off in August, with a week of tours, talks, and get-to-know-you events, including a welcome reception and a behind-the-scenes tour of the new MIT Museum. The fellows will have a brief break before the start of fall classes, and KSJ’s seminar series will launch on September 13th with a visit from Mark Abrahams, originator of the annual Ig Nobel Prize ceremonies and editor of the Annals of Improbable Research. (Many, though not all, of the KSJ seminars are open to interested members of the public; contact learning and events coordinator Claire Sadar for more info If you would like to attend a specific lecture.)

This year’s fellows hail from the U.S., India, Poland, and Canada. While in Cambridge, they will delve into topics ranging from the diagnosis of mental disorders, to climate change’s impacts on soil and farming, to how machine learning algorithms are affecting communication. Read below to learn more about the fellows and their interests:

2022-23 KSJ Fellows

Mary-Rose Abraham is an independent multimedia journalist based in Bangalore, India. Her stories have been featured in BBC News, National Geographic, The Guardian, Deutsche Welle, Earth Island Journal, and Vice. She is the co-creator and co-host of “Scrolls & Leaves,” a world history, science and cultures podcast that has been featured by Spotify. Before moving to India, she was a staff producer at ABC News in New York, reported and produced for NPR, and was a researcher at NBC News. Abraham grew up in Los Angeles and has an undergraduate degree in Biology from UCLA and master’s degree (with honors) in Journalism from Columbia University.

Laura Bliss is a writer, reporter and editor based in San Francisco. On staff at Bloomberg CityLab, she writes about local policy and politics for a national audience, including transportation, housing and environmental issues. She is the editor of the new book, “The Quarantine Atlas,” a collection of 65 maps and essays revealing pandemic life around the world, drawn from a global audience engagement project she co-led at Bloomberg CityLab. She also writes the MapLab newsletter, and is the host of the podcast “Bedrock, USA,” a podcast about political extremism, small town life and the fight for democracy. Her reporting and writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Atlantic, Los Angeles magazine, Sierra magazine, and many other outlets.

Wojtek Brzezinski is a freelance science journalist based in Warsaw, and the former creator and host of Poland’s first weekly sci-tech TV news show, “Horyzont Zdarzen.” His recent work focuses on the effects that digital systems have on society and includes co-authoring the book “Strefy Cyberwojny” (“Cyber Warzones”) with Agata Kazmierska. His stories have been published by Tygodnik Powszechny, Poland’s oldest weekly, leading broadcasters like TVN and Polsat News, the Interia.pl news portal, and many other outlets. Brzezinski has won several national and European awards for his work, including the 2006 Prix CIRCOM for Europe’s best regional TV news story.

Sébastien Malo is a climate and environment reporter in New York for Reuters. He was a climate correspondent with the Thomson Reuters Foundation from 2015 to 2019. He has reported on climate change from the corridors of the United Nations to the farmlands of Niger and U.S. courts. He holds a master’s degree in international affairs from the Graduate Institute, Geneva, and a master’s degree in journalism with honors from Columbia University. He’s previously worked for Lebanon’s The Daily Star and investigative news website The New York World.

Kelly Servick is a staff reporter and editor at Science Magazine, where she has covered biomedical research and biotechnology, drug development, and most recently, neuroscience. Her work has also appeared in Scientific American, Wired, and other outlets. Her story on the use of lab-engineered mosquitoes to control insect-borne diseases in Brazil was a finalist for the U.S. National Association of Science Writers Science in Society award. She has a B.A. in cognitive science and is a graduate of the Science Communication Program at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

2022-23 Sharon Begley Fellows

Ambar Castillo was most recently a Poynter-Koch Media and Journalism Fellow at the Washington City Paper. She earned her B.A. in Latin American Studies at Boston University and an M.A. in Spanish-language journalism at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism, where she concentrated on health/science reporting. A Fulbright India research scholar, she researched complex human relationships, worked with StoryCorps, and at hyperlocal newspapers in the Bronx. Castillo has also worked with international communities in the health, education, and theater spheres from Brooklyn to Boston.

Brittany Trang, a scientist and writer, most recently was an American Association for the Advancement of Science Mass Media Fellow at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and a freelance writer. Her work has appeared in Chemical & Engineering News, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, and Chemistry World. Brittany has an undergraduate degree in chemistry and English from the Ohio State University and a chemistry Ph.D. from Northwestern University, where she developed PFAS remediation methods.

by KSJ Staff / May 2nd 2018 / KSJ News & Events

2018-19 Fellows Announced

The Knight Science Journalism program at MIT, an internationally renowned mid-career fellowship program, is proud to announce that ten elite science journalists from four countries will make up its Class of 2018-19.

Each year the KSJ program, which celebrates its 35th anniversary this year, brings journalists to Cambridge for a ten-month fellowship that allows them to explore science, technology, and the craft of journalism in depth, to concentrate on a specialty in science, and to learn at some of the top research universities in the world.

The ten fellows, selected from more than 120 applicants, are an award-winning and diverse group, ranging from veteran science reporters for the Los Angeles Times and the Associated Press to the Cairo-based chief editor of Nature Middle East to a Russian-born Ph.D. in economics who found a new career as an investigative data journalist.

“We are thrilled to again bring a remarkable group of science journalists to MIT,” said Deborah Blum, KSJ director, herself a Pulitzer-prize winning journalist and the author of six popular science books. “We know they’ll find this a unique, fascinating and influential learning experience — and we look forward learning from them as well.”

KSJ@MIT, supported by a generous endowment from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, is recognized around the world as the premier mid-career fellowship program for science writers, editors, and multimedia journalists, and as publisher of the award-winning digital magazine Undark. Since its founding in 1983, it has hosted more than 300 fellows representing media outlets from The New York Times to Le Monde, from CNN to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and more.

With support from the program, fellows pursue an academic year of independent study, augmented by twice-weekly science-focused seminars taught by some of the world’s leading scientists and storytellers, as well as a variety of rotating, skills-focused master classes and workshops. The goal: fostering professional growth among the world’s small but essential community of journalists covering science and technology, and encouraging them to pursue that mission, first and foremost, in the public interest.

KSJ’s academic home at MIT is the Department of Science, Technology and Society, which is part of the School of Humanities Arts and Social Sciences.

Pakinam Amer, chief editor of Nature Middle East, published by Nature Research and part of Springer Nature, one of the world’s leading global research publishers. Previously, she worked as a journalist for media including the Associated Press, the German Press Agency, Egypt Today, and Business Today. Before becoming a science journalist, she specialized in current affairs and conflict reporting in Egypt and the Arab world. She produces and hosts Nature Middle East’s podcast, the Arab region’s first science podcast in English.

Magnus Bjerg, a digital projects manager at TV 2 in Denmark, the biggest Danish news broadcaster. He is part of the station’s editorial development team, which won five digital awards in 2017, including honors from the Society for News Design Scandinavia and the Association of Danish Media (best digital story of the year), and is president of the Danish Online News Association. Previously
he was a digital reporter at ekstrabladet.dk, Denmark’s most viewed news site.

Talia Bronshtein, investigative data journalist and former interactives editor at STAT, the Boston-based health news site. After earning a doctorate in economics, she was a Fulbright scholar at Brandeis University, a professor of economics in her native country of Russia, and a consultant on Eastern Europe and Central Asia. Her visualization of 200 years of immigration to the U.S. was featured in “Best American Infographics 2016,” and her investigation of reporting violations in clinical trials won an AAAS Kavli Science Journalism Gold Award.

Jason Dearen, correspondent and member of the global environment team for The Associated Press. His accountability journalism has spurred regulatory action and policy change at both state and federal levels. His coverage of flooded toxic waste sites during Hurricane Harvey exposed inaction by the EPA, resulting in $115 million in clean-up efforts in Houston. He has received numerous honors, including from Investigative Reporters and Editors and the Society of Environmental Journalists. He attended the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism.

Lisa De Bode, a freelance journalist who writes in English and Dutch for The Atlantic, NPR, and The Guardian, among others. A former reporter at Al Jazeera America in New York and a field producer at CNN in Brussels, she is the author of “Europa: An Illustrated Introduction to Europe for Migrants and Refugees,” and a 2017 fellow at the International Women’s Media Foundation. In 2016, her reporting sparked a law that provides free pads and tampons to New York City shelters, public schools, and prisons.

Tim De Chant, senior digital editor at NOVA, where he is founding editor of the digital magazine NOVA Next, and a lecturer in MIT’s Graduate Program in Science Writing. He has written for Wired, the Chicago Tribune, and Ars Technica, among others. Before turning to science journalism, he received a Ph.D. in landscape ecology from the University of California, Berkeley, and his B.A. in environmental studies, English, and biology from St. Olaf College.

Jeff DelViscio, director of multimedia and creative at STAT, where he oversees video, photography, animation, interactives, audio, and social media. He previously spent nearly nine years at The New York Times. He holds dual master’s degrees from Columbia in journalism and in earth and environmental sciences. He has worked aboard oceanographic research vessels and tracked money and politics in science from Washington, D.C. When Jeff was 3, science saved his life after a run-in with a lawnmower; he’s been trying to give back to science ever since.

Elana Gordon, reporter and audio producer at WHYY public radio in Philadelphia and a founding member of its health and science show, “The Pulse.” She previously worked at KCUR in Kansas City. She has covered everything from drugs and medical bills to the mystery surrounding a 19^th-century horse thief. Her stories have been featured on NPR, Kaiser Health News, “99% Invisible,” The Washington Post, and PRI’s “The World.” In 2017, her documentary about the discovery of Legionnaires’ disease received a regional Edward R. Murrow Award.

Rachel E. Gross, online science editor at Smithsonian magazine, where she helps readers make sense of new scientific discoveries and spotlights unsung women in the history of science. Before that she was a science reporter for Slate , where she won the 2016 Religion News Association’s Best Online News Story Award for her profile of an evangelical creationist who embraced evolution. She has covered religion and science for Moment, America’s leading independent Jewish magazine, and traveled to Auschwitz on a FASPE fellowship to study journalism ethics.

Amina Khan, science writer at the Los Angeles Times. Over nearly nine years at the paper, she has covered Mars landings, explored underground gold mines, and witnessed a brain surgery. A graduate of the University of California, Berkeley, she’s the author of “Adapt,” a book about the future of biologically inspired design, and was a staff writer for the Netflix show “Bill Nye Saves the World.”

by Laura Castañón / April 11th 2018 / Fellowship Life

This Year’s Fellows: Caty Enders

“I like demystifying things for readers and I like tackling difficult subjects.” Photo: Joshua Hatch.

This is the tenth in a series of profiles of the 2017-18 Knight Science Journalism fellows, written by students in MIT’s Graduate Program in Science Writing.

It can be upsetting to be told you have a government microchip in your brain. But compared to the other inexplicable statements Caty Enders encountered at Cliven Bundy’s ranch in Bunkerville, Nevada, in 2014, the writing on a sedan seemed relatively restrained: “Google doctors that remove microchips.”

Enders had traveled to Bundy’s ranch to pursue an environmental story for NPR. She was reporting on how the clash between ranchers and the federal Bureau of Land Management stemmed from a long history of flawed water management in the West. Instead, she found a group of militia members accusing the bureau of conspiring with Sen. Harry Reid, the U.N., and Chinese solar farms. Enders was perplexed. “The people who were there had reason to be angry,” she said, “but those reasons were not actually connected to the anger they were acting out.” The piece for NPR never materialized. She ended up writing a shorter story for Esquire detailing some of the absurd beliefs that were spiraling through the Bundy camp.

Enders never intended to be a journalist. With four generations of scientists in her family and a passion for big mountains, a career as a field biologist seemed inevitable. After taking a poetry class in her first semester at Northwestern, however, Enders decided to buck family tradition and major in creative writing. The professor, Mary Kinzie, accepted her as a research assistant and inspired her growth as a writer: “She made me realize that, through writing, I never had to study just one thing and work on that for the rest of my life.”

Enders’s path as a writer led to a fascination with radio journalism and a semester at the Salt Institute for Documentary Studies before landing her first internship at “Here & Now,” a co-production of NPR and WBUR in Boston. Since then she has worked as a freelance radio producer and writer, an editor for Outside magazine, and most recently as series editor and supervising producer for podcasts at The Guardian’s U.S. edition. The experience at the Bundy ranch, however, remains in her mind. “It’s certainly not the best story I’ve ever written,” she explains, “but it stuck with me because I think it foreshadowed a lot of what’s going on in the country in ways that I didn’t anticipate that the time.”

As a 2017-18 Knight Science Journalism fellow, Enders finally has a chance to dig deeper into that story. She is spending the fellowship investigating how we determine what is real and looking for the answers that have been eluding her since 2014. “I think it’s a thread that runs through all of the work that I do,” she said. “For a lot of journalists, I think you grapple with the problem of chasing — of how to deal with — misinformation.”

She hopes that what she finds will be illuminating for both her and her audience. “I like demystifying things for readers and I like tackling difficult subjects,” Enders says. “You sort of have that inherently in science stories.”

by Fatima Husain / March 29th 2018 / Fellowship Life

This Year’s Fellows: Mićo Tatalović

A boyhood interest in biology kept growing: Mićo Tatalović on a research vessel during the fellows’ trip to Woods Hole. Photo: Joshua Hatch.

This is the ninth in a series of profiles of the 2017-18 Knight Science Journalism fellows, written by students in MIT’s Graduate Program in Science Writing.

Mićo Tatalović is the environment and life sciences news editor of New Scientist and the chair of the Association of British Science Writers. He came to the Knight Science Journalism Program after many years of editing, writing, and facilitating science-writing projects across Europe.

Born in Rijeka, Croatia, he began his journey to science journalism as a boy, harvesting wild strawberries and ripe potatoes with his grandmother in the countryside. Those experiences planted an interest in biology that kept growing during his undergraduate years at the University of Oxford in England. Then, as a graduate student at the University of Cambridge, he studied zoology and animal behavior, focusing on sentinel meerkats.

While doing field research in South Africa, he began writing articles on meerkats for general audiences. And after graduating from Cambridge with a master’s degree, he entered the science communication program at Imperial College London.

After a series of internships and short jobs in both science and medical writing, Tatalović joined SciDev.net, reporting on scientific advancement and development around the world. As part of his position, he worked with journalists from developing countries and prepared their works for publication. His interest in helping others improve their skills led to his current involvement in two professional networks, the Association of British Science Writers and the Balkan Network of Science Journalists.

Over the course of the fellowship, Tatalović hopes to reflect on his experiences in science journalism with a focus on critically evaluating and improving his work for the future. He looks forward to attending seminars that discuss newer forms of media and technology, and learning about developments in scientific research. Temporarily free from publishing deadlines and editorial commitments, he also intends to develop his skills in investigative journalism and to spend time learning about fields of science he has not studied before.

“It’s a dream come true to be here at MIT and to have the privilege of taking classes and talking to all these world experts here and at Harvard University,” he says. “So many things are happening here … so many things that will change the world.

“To actually be here and to see it for yourself is amazing.”

by Kelsey Tsipis / March 9th 2018 / Fellowship Life

This Year’s Fellows: Sujata Gupta

From local reporter to park ranger to freelancer, writing about food, ecology, and health for publications like The New Yorker, Nature, Scientific American, and Wired.

This is the eighth in a series of profiles of the 2017-18 Knight Science Journalism fellows, written by students in MIT’s Graduate Program in Science Writing.

Years before Sujata Gupta knew she wanted to be a science writer, disheartened by a micromanaging editor and unsure of her next career move, she fled her native upstate New York for Hawaii, spending part of her 20s living in a tent among runaways and fugitives.

Originally chasing a job at a newspaper in Molokai, she instead found herself working on an organic pineapple farm on Maui, making smoothies by day and freelancing from her tent at night.

“If you go to Maui as a tourist, you see one way of life,” she says. “But there are all these people in Hawaii who are fleeing life, law, family. They are just running, which I guess I was doing, from reality.”

Gupta remembers her brief escape from reality with retrospective humor, recalling stories of escaping a rat hole (“literally”), being bitten multiple times by centipedes (she still has the scars), and using a machete to chop open coconuts (she miraculously still has all 10 fingers).

But if her time on the island was marked more by squalor than by tropical splendor, it did end up playing a formative role in her career as a science writer. After the pineapple farm she landed a job with the Hawaii Natural History Association, giving guided tours on indigenous culture. There she gained a greater appreciation of ethnobotany, the intersection of people, plants and culture, which has remained at the forefront of her work ever since.

Moving to the mainland but still pursuing this passion, Gupta worked as a park ranger at Mojave National Preserve in California, then at Acadia National Park in Maine. Shortly afterward, she earned her master’s degree in science writing from Johns Hopkins University and subsequently completed an internship with New Scientist in San Francisco. From there she focused her freelance career on writing about issues related to food, ecology, and health for publications like The New Yorker, Nature, Scientific American, and Wired.

Now in her 30s, she has traded in her venturesome challenges for more domestic ones, including, over the summer, choosing between day-care centers in Cambridge for her 2-year-old daughter and sending her 5-year-old son off to kindergarten. “I know I’m going to cry,” she lamented back in September.

During her nine-month Knight Science Journalism fellowship, Gupta plans to try out innovative ways of communicating science to children (and maybe adults) by embedding science concepts in children’s stories, both nonfiction and fiction. She hopes to reach individuals across the learning spectrum.

She also plans to hone her photography skills, which she says she shelved after high school, and refine her multimedia skill set to create an online component to a children’s book.

As for returning to Hawaii, Gupta says she’s ready: “I really want to go back now. Everyone’s like ‘You want to write about Hawaii, that’s just a joke.’ But I really want to write about issues in Hawaii. Racial, environmental, it has it all.”

by KSJ@MIT / February 15th 2018 / KSJ News & Events

Power On! Help for Puerto Rico, With a Hand From KSJ

Five months after Hurricane Maria struck Puerto Rico, 40 percent of the island’s population — more than a million people — still lack access to safe drinking water and electricity. The MIT D-Lab is helping out: As part of an extracurricular activity for the course called Water. Climate Change, and Health, classmates — including 2017-18 KSJ fellow Teresa Carr, right — recently traveled to North Andover, Massachusetts, to volunteer.

Alongside workers from the solar power industry, the class took part in Power On, Puerto Rico, a project sponsored by the nonprofit disaster-relief organization Amurtel. The goal: sending the island 10 trailers fitted with filtration systems that can purify 600 gallons of water daily, and with solar-powered stations to charge up to 10 phones and five laptops at a time. A spokesperson for Amurtel says three trailers should be in place by the end of February and the organization is currently raising funds to equip seven more.