KSJ fellows Archives - Page 9 of 12 - Knight Science Journalism @MIT

by Knight Science Journalism / November 18th 2021 / Announcements

Knight Science Journalism Names Eight to 2022-23 Fellowship Class

Editor’s Note, 06/22/22: Since this story first ran, four of the journalists named to the 2022-23 KSJ Fellowship class opted to defer their appointments for an additional year, and a journalist who had yet to commit to the 2022-23 class at the time of the original announcement has since confirmed her acceptance of the fellowship. As a result, the official 2022-23 fellowship class will consist of five fellows: Mary-Rose Abraham, an independent multimedia journalist based in Bangalore, India; Laura Bliss, a reporter and editor for CityLab, a division of Bloomberg News; Wojtek Brzeziński, a freelance science journalist based in Warsaw; Sebastien Malo, a climate and environment reporter in New York for Reuters; and Kelly Servick, a staff reporter and editor at Science Magazine.

After a two-year period of remote fellowships due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the Knight Science Journalism Program at M.I.T. is delighted to announce the resumption of its in-person fellowship program next August with a class that includes eight esteemed journalists from the U.S. and beyond.

The incoming fellows were originally selected to come to M.I.T. during the 2020-21 academic year, but their appointments were deferred due to the pandemic. The cohort includes award-winning freelancers, broadcast journalists, and staff reporters for outlets such as New Scientist, Reuters, and Science magazine. Selected from a pool of more than 100 applicants and representing countries ranging from Indonesia to Poland, the fellows have already planned an ambitious year of studies. While in Cambridge, they will delve into topics ranging from childhood cognitive development, to climate change’s impacts on freshwater ecosystems, to the use of algorithms in health and criminal justice.

“We’re thrilled to be able to relaunch our in-person fellowships in Cambridge with this talented, diverse group of journalists who are already thinking about such a wide array of interesting and important questions” said Knight Science Journalism Program Director Deborah Blum.

Because the upcoming fellowship class will consist of previously selected fellows who deferred their appointments due to the pandemic, the Knight Science Journalism Program will not accept applications for the 2022-23 academic year. The program will open again to new applicants in November 2022 for its 2023-24 fellowship class.

The Knight Science Journalism program, 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 journalists. The program’s goal is to foster professional growth among the world’s small but essential community of journalists covering science and technology, and encourage them to pursue that mission, first and foremost, in the public interest.

During its two-year pause on in-person fellowships, the Knight Science Journalism Program launched remote, project fellowships that supported nearly 40 U.S. journalists pursuing in-depth, independent reporting projects. Since its founding in 1983, the Knight Science Journalism Program has hosted more than 350 fellows representing media outlets from The New York Times to Le Monde, from CNN to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, and more.

“KSJ has a long tradition of playing host to some of the world’s best science journalists,” said Ashley Smart, the program’s associate director. “With this incoming class, the tradition continues.”

Below is a list of the 2022-23 Knight Science Journalism 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.

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.

Jessica Hamzelou is a health and medical science reporter at New Scientist. She has a special interest in fertility, neuroscience, and the intersection between health, wellbeing, and technology. Jessica was named British Science Writer of the Year in 2018 by the Association of British Science Writers, and Best Specialist Digital Writer by the British Society of Magazine Editors in 2018 and 2021. She holds an undergraduate degree in biomedical sciences and a master’s in science communication.

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.

Chikezie Omeje is a Nigerian data and science journalist. He previously reported for the International Centre for Investigative Reporting, where he was initially tasked with building a health and science desk and later headed the newsroom. Before that, he was a news editor at Aso Radio and covered the environment and health. He has won many awards, including the best prize at the African Science Desk Journalism Awards and African Fact Checking Awards. He holds an MS in data journalism from Columbia University and an MA in journalism with a concentration in science from Stellenbosch University.

Justin O’Neill is a freelance audio producer and reporter based in Richmond, Virginia. Most recently, Justin helped create and launch the Smithsonian Institution’s Sidedoor podcast. As the show’s senior producer, he worked on nearly 100 episodes, reporting stories about wild gorilla researchers who created a crash vaccination program to stop a viral outbreak; geneticists who unlocked the smells of extinct plants; and entomologists who studied mosquito adaptation in Panama. Before his time at the Smithsonian, Justin produced space stories at NASA and podcasts about science of all kinds at National Geographic. He began his career in audio journalism at NPR’s Weekend Edition.

Dyna Rochmyaningsih is a freelance science journalist whose works have appeared in Science Magazine, Nature, BBC Future, and many others. Based in rural North Sumatra, she has written extensively on the intersection of science and society in Indonesia, the Global South, and the Islamic World. Rochmyaningsih earned a B.Sc. in biology from Bogor Agricultural University and is an alumnus of SjCOOP Asia, a science journalism program organized by the World Federation of Science Journalists. She won first prize in the “Struggle with Politics Project” at the 2019 World Conference of Science Journalists. She is also the Executive Director of the Society of Indonesian Science Journalists.

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.

by Ashley Belanger / February 21st 2020 / Fellowship Life

Meet This Year’s Fellows: Tony Leys

At MIT, the veteran Des Moines Register reporter looks to raise the bar on mental health reporting.

In 2000, Tony Leys was at a crossroads. Since he’d broken in at the copy desk of The Des Moines Register 12 years earlier, he had diligently advanced up the paper’s editing ranks — from assignment editor to night editor, to state editor, and then to political editor, an important position in a state known for its influence on presidential primaries.

Leys was hoping to become a managing editor, a role he’d dreamed of having ever since he was a journalism student working for a student newspaper at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. But then his boss, storied reporter and editor Richard Tapscott, gave him a sharp dose of reality. As Leys remembers it, Tapscott told him he wasn’t qualified to become a top editor, because he didn’t have much reporting experience.

Leys faced a decision: He could remain content in his role as a mid-level editor at Iowa’s most prestigious newspaper, or he could go out and report. Hesitantly, he chose the latter. The choice permanently thrust him in a new direction, putting him on the path that would eventually bring him to MIT as a Knight Science Journalism Fellow. And he hasn’t looked back.

After his fateful conversation with Tapscott, Leys took a health reporting job that had just opened up at The Register. Leys recalls that he “didn’t know anything” about the beat, but he “knew it was interesting.” And he soon found out that it was full of surprises — so long as he was willing to follow unexpected leads.

A case in point was last year, when Leys received a string of mysterious emails from obviously masked accounts about a spate of deaths at the Glenwood Resource Center, a state-run institution in rural Iowa that cares for adults with severe intellectual disabilities. The messages struck a chord, Leys said. “Families struggle everywhere, but they especially struggle in rural areas to both find care and also to find understanding, and not just feel like an outcast.” Following his intuition, he responded to the emails. So began the reporting for what would become an April 2019 feature story exposing an alarming spike in deaths at the facility — and widespread concerns about its quality of care.

Leys’ reporting at The Des Moines Register has covered a vast range of topics, from in-depth health reports vital to everyday Iowans, to presidential campaign stories that grab national attention. But for most of his reporting career, his primary focus has been mental health.

Last year, Leys’ ambitions to raise the bar on mental health reporting led him to step away from the Des Moines newspaper for the first time in three decades. As a Knight Science Journalism Fellow at MIT, he is studying neuroscience. He says he hopes to learn more about the science behind treatments for mental health disorders and diseases, and “what the promise and limits of those treatments are.”

Leys says it’s all in service of doing more accurate, intimate reporting about patient experiences — reporting that he hopes will make readers realize, “Wow, that could be my family.”

This is the seventh 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 Fernanda Ferreira / February 11th 2020 / Fellowship Life

Meet This Year’s Fellows: Richard Fisher

The BBC editor and New Scientist alum has ambitions to reimagine the way society thinks about the future.

When Richard Fisher realized that he was having more fun writing reviews of DJ nights for a Durham University student website than pursuing his degree in geology, he figured that he should try to get paid to write. This decision would take him to City University of London, where he earned a post-graduate degree in magazine journalism, and eventually to a number of editor positions, first at New Scientist and, most recently, at the BBC. Now it has brought him to MIT, where, as a Knight Science Journalism Fellow, he has ambitions to reimagine the way society thinks about the future.

It’s a fitting goal for Fisher, who for the past five years has been the editor of BBC Future, the science, technology, and health website of BBC.com. Though he got into journalism through writing, Fisher says he enjoys the problem-solving element of editing. Each writer he works with has a different style, requiring a different approach, and it’s Fisher’s job to figure out what a piece needs. “Some writers leave lots of gaps, so you have to fill them. Some writers write too much detail, so you have to take the details out,” he explains.

At BBC Future, Fisher spends time finding new writers for the site, and he enjoys working with journalists in the early stages of their career. “You realize that you can help them write an amazing piece that will help catapult their career,” he says. “Editors have the ability to do that.”

Fisher may have left geology in 2002, but he has kept a geologist’s ability to see the world in a long-term way, a mindset at odds with a contemporary society dominated by short-term cycles: four-year political terms, three-month financial quarters, ever-shortening news cycles. For Fisher this is a serious issue. “The major problems that we need to solve in the 21^st century — climate change, antibiotic resistance, inequality, poverty — are helped by a long-term view,” he explains. He gives the example of a politician up for re-election who represents coal-mining voters, but knows that the world is moving towards renewables. “Politicians themselves are not incentivized to think about the long-term.”

Politicians aren’t the only ones. “There are big problems we need to tackle, like climate change, and we haven’t worked out how much sacrifice we are willing to bear in the present day for the sake of future generations,” Fisher says. Society, in other words, has proven unable to think beyond the short-term to make a better world for tomorrow.

Fisher’s project as a Knight Science Journalism Fellow is to understand this short-termism, particularly how it became so pervasive, and whether it is part of human nature or a recent phenomenon. He believes his temporary hiatus from day-to-day writing and editing has helped him break out of the journalistic mindset and be open-minded about where his project goes. “You don’t know where your influence will come from on your research project,” he says. He points out that some of his favorite science writing draws from a number of sources, from philosophy and literature to culture and political science. “I think that’s what I’m trying to do here.”

This is the sixth 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 Kate S. Petersen / January 2nd 2020 / Fellowship Life, KSJ News & Events

Meet This Year’s Fellows: Sonali Prasad

“It’s important to tell a story. But it’s equally important how you tell it.”

The city of New Delhi, where Sonali Prasad grew up, rests on a series of fault lines and is intermittently shaken by earthquakes. A few hundred miles to the northeast, the colliding Indian and Eurasian tectonic plates slowly force the peaks of the Himalayan mountains toward the sky. “You have these beautiful mountains, but people don’t realize that it’s because the earth is moving,” Prasad explains. “If you didn’t have earthquakes, you wouldn’t have mountains.”

As a journalist who’s reported in depth on the human toll of earthquakes, Prasad understands all too well how seismic forces can shape social, psychological, and physical landscapes. Now she’s spending a year at MIT as a Knight Science Journalism fellow, and she wants to try telling these stories in a new way: through art and performance.

The shift has been years in the making. Prasad got her start writing as a reporter for her campus newspaper, while she was an undergraduate student in Singapore. She became chief editor during her sophomore year, and by the time she graduated with a degree in computer science, her penchant and passion for writing were well developed. She went on to earn a master’s degree in journalism from Columbia University, where she later worked as an investigative journalist. She began to win plaudits as a writer, receiving fellowships and grants such as the Google News Lab fellowship and the Pulitzer fellowship.

But it was a “Magic Grant” from Columbia’s Brown Institute that proved pivotal in Prasad’s career as a science journalist. The grant funded a project called RE(ef)SOURCE, in which Prasad and other reporters distributed underwater cameras to scuba divers, who used them to collect images of coral reefs in the Florida Keys. By analyzing the colors in the photographs, the team could collect original and autonomous data about the reefs’ health.

“I love the written form,” Prasad says, “but when I got to work with the Magic Grant … I realized that you can do storytelling in a different way.” She says the experience showed her that she could mesh her technical background and her journalism to “do something very innovative.”

Now Prasad is turning that innovative eye toward earthquakes — in particular, the risks they present to vulnerable communities. She says most people think of earthquakes as natural disasters, but she advocates for them to be considered through a social and structural lens. As she sees it, the destruction resulting from an earthquake is typically more related to the collapse of human infrastructure than it is to the quake itself. “We have devastation because we are not good at managing the hazard, which turns into a disaster,” she says. To Prasad, reframing that narrative provides an opportunity to think critically about how we organize society and adopt practices that support human well-being during earthquakes.

At MIT, Prasad is splitting her time between science and art classes. She plans to create an immersive, multimedia exhibit that engages audiences with earthquake science. “I really love the idea of performing your journalism, whether it’s an art piece or an installation,“ she says. “It’s important to tell a story. But it’s equally important how you tell it. So, you know, I work on pushing the craft as much as I work on telling the story.”

This is the fourth 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 Knight Science Journalism / June 4th 2019 / Fellowship Life, KSJ News & Events

A Year in Words, Pictures, and Virtual Reality: Highlights From the KSJ Showcase

The 2018-19 Knight Science Journalism fellows arrived on campus last August with big ambitions, and now they’re leaving with even bigger accomplishments. During a three-day Showcase in May, the fellows’ drive, creativity, and journalistic talents were on full display.

“I came here in search of the perfect empathy machine,” recalled Pakinam Amer, referring to a term commonly used to describe augmented and virtual reality. At MIT, Amer set out to discover for herself the technologies’ potential for science storytelling. Through an intense crash course that included hackathons and hands-on class projects, Amer built working virtual reality experiences, including a climate-change inspired adventure that challenged users to escape from a supermarket of the dystopian future, and a physics experience that put the user at the helm of a CERN-like particle collider.

Rachel Gross tests out an augmented reality experience of a deep sea jellyfish, created by Jeff DelViscio.

Like Amer, Jeff DelViscio also spent much of his year immersed in the world of AR and VR storytelling — an intense experience he described as a “concentrated shot of new learning.” And like Amer, DelViscio had a lot to show for his efforts: He dazzled guests with VR experiences that took users into the mind and laboratory of Santiago Ramón y Cajal — the Spanish scientist and Nobel laureate known for producing the first detailed drawings of neurons — and to the depths of the mid-Atlantic ridge for an up-close look a striking landscape of calcium-deposit towers known as the lost city. DelViscio said he envisions an “impossible aquarium,” a virtual experience that would allow users to explore the hidden creatures of the deep sea. Through the magic of AR, he brought one of those creatures, a deep-sea jellyfish, to life on the conference room table.

Neither Amer nor DelViscio are convinced that augmented and virtual reality will become newsroom mainstays, but they both agree that the immersive experience — if done right — opens up new possibilities for storytelling.

If journalists are to have any hope of incorporating technologies like AR and VR into their storytelling toolkit, they’ll need the help of developers, said Magnus Bjerg. But Bjerg believes that journalists need developers for much more than that. “I would argue that we also need them to stay alive,” he said. Bjerg spent his year at MIT exploring the journalist-developer relationship — and devising best practices to improve it. He interviewed two dozen thought leaders from some of the world’s top newsrooms and digital media producers, including BBC News, USA Today, The Guardian, and The Washington Post. His takeaway? Much of the friction between journalists and developers stems from cultural differences, but good communication, good team building, and good product management can break down those barriers.

Pakinam Amer, presenting her work at the KSJ showcase.

In a presentation that brought new perspective to the opioid crisis, audio journalist Elana Gordon showed herself to be a master of multimedia production. She blended audio interviews, visuals, and expert narrative into a story that had the feel of a live podcast production. During her fellowship year, her research on addiction took her from the halls of MIT, to the streets of Boston and Lynn, to Mexico, where she visited clinics and hospitals to learn about the country’s healthcare system. She weaved those threads together into a gripping oral history of drug use and policy, told largely through the lens of a person who helped create some of the first syringe exchanges in Massachusetts.

The syringe happened to also be a central character in Jason Dearen’s fellowship work. Dearen spent his year uncovering the story behind the worst outbreak of fungal meningitis in U.S. history — an outbreak traced to tainted pain medication prepared at the New England Compounding Center, just outside Boston. Epidural injections of the drug sickened 850 people and claimed more than a hundred lives, Dearen said. For his deep dive into the outbreak and the shadowy drug industry that caused it, Dearen spoke with victims’ families, sat in on courtroom trials, took courses on epidemiology, and boned up on federal regulatory policy. The story may be coming soon to a bookshelf near you: Dearen recently signed a deal with Avery, a Penguin Random House imprint, to write a book about the outbreak.

This much was true of Rachel Gross’s year at MIT: She wasn’t afraid to get her hands dirty. Her fellowship exploits included dissecting sheep brains for an anatomy lab, watching a live birth from the delivery room, and shadowing a surgeon during a procedure to remove of a dermoid cyst. But the apple of her keenly observant eye was the female clitoris. Through the captivating story of the relationship between French author Marie Bonaparte and Sigmund Freud, Gross how ignorance about the clitoris — a widely misunderstood “iceberg organ” that lies mostly under the surface — has contributed to some of humanity’s most horrific and sexist practices, including genital mutilation.

To say that most of us are confused by blockchain and bitcoin would be an understatement. But Talia Bronshtein isn’t most people. The economics professor-turned-data journalist spent her year at MIT developing tools to demystify the concepts behind decentralized computing. In her presentation, she demonstrated those tools with professorial skill: Using a pair of scissors, a stack of Post-It notes, and a page from a “Where’s Waldo?” children’s book, Bronshtein walked her audience through the basics of cryptography and blockchain. The crown jewel of her work was a self-updating database of more than 2000 experts in the field of decentralized applications. She plans to use the tool to curate news from the world of decentralized applications — and hopefully take some of the mystery out of a technology that’s sure to play an increasing role in society.

Lisa De Bode speaks on day three of the KSJ Showcase.

How to make the complicated plain? That question — which has vexed many a science journalist — provided the backdrop for Amina Khan’s fellowship year. Khan wasn’t interested in just any old science question; she dove head first into the search for life on other planets — a topic, as she describes it, at the “nexus of physics, chemistry, and biology.” In her quest to find ways to make the material approachable and memorable to the lay public, she came up with enough ideas to fill any vision board: Evergreen explainers that would serve as “connective tissue” between breaking news content, games that reinforce basic concepts, and even educational comic strips.

From art exhibits like Ai Weiwei’s “Frankenstein Tree” to city hall debates about tree-protection ordinances, trees have taken on a new life in this era of heightened concern about climate change and resilience. Lisa De Bode dove right into the thick of the topic during her year at MIT, chronicling the growing environmental personhood movement in Cambridge and beyond. She explored the deep and — in some cases, troubling — roots of the movement, whose members range from neopagans who share a ritualistic relationship with trees, to people struggling with climate grief who feel that “nature has become an extension of their bodies,” to academics.

Though people may disagree over whether trees should have legal rights, there’s little dispute that the climate is changing, and Tim De Chant wants to help ordinary people do something about it. His project was to build a new digital publication focused on the transition to clean energy — or, as he put it, to build a model of sustainable climate journalism. After months working through the inevitable kinks and questions — Where will the funding come from? What will the magazine look like? — he was able to debut a beta version: A handsomely designed site that he describes as Wirecutter for climate conscious consumers. The new magazine, Future Proof, will feature a mix of product reviews and investigative journalism. A soft launch is planned for this summer.

The 2018-19 fellows meet with MIT President L. Rafael Reif.

De Chant closed his talk by mentioning how invaluable it was to have the support of a tight-knit cohort of fellows, a sentiment echoed by many of the other fellows. After the showcase wrapped up, fellows geared up for the year’s final two events: A graduation ceremony with MIT President Rafael Reif, and a farewell dinner with family, friends, and KSJ staff. The dinner marked an end to one chapter and the beginning of another: The fellows’ plans for the coming year are varied, but all are set to soar to new heights.

by Knight Science Journalism / May 6th 2019 / Announcements, KSJ News & Events

Knight Science Journalism Program Announces 2019-20 Fellows

The fellows will come to Cambridge to explore science, technology, and the craft of journalism at some of the top research universities in the world.

The Knight Science Journalism program at MIT, an internationally renowned mid-career fellowship program, is proud to announce that ten elite science journalists representing seven countries and four continents will make up its class of 2019-20.

The fellows, selected from more than 120 applicants, are an award-winning and diverse group. They include accomplished reporters from the Des Moines Register and Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, veteran editors of international outlets like the BBC and New Scientist, and a freelance journalist who was recently named the European Science Writer of the Year.

The fellows will come 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.

“This is a tremendous group of journalists doing work that has real impact,” said KSJ director Deborah Blum. “I think they’ll find that Cambridge is really a unique and inspiring place to learn and grow as a science journalist.”

The Knight Science Journalism program, 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. With support from the program, fellows pursue an academic year of independent study, augmented by twice-weekly 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.

Since its founding in 1983, the program has hosted more than 350 fellows representing media outlets from The New York Times to Le Monde, from CNN to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, and more.

In addition to the fellowship program, KSJ publishes the award-winning digital magazine Undark and administers a national journalism prize, the Victor K. McElheny Award. 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.

Here are the 2019-20 KSJ fellows:

Anil Ananthaswamy is a freelance journalist and former staﬀ writer and deputy news editor for New Scientist. He also writes for Nature, Scientific American, Quanta, and PNAS’s Front Matter, among others. In 2013, he won the Association of British Science Writers’ Best Investigative Journalism award. He has authored three books: “The Edge of Physics,” “The Man Who Wasn’t There,” which was longlisted for the 2016 Pen/E. O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award, and most recently, “Through Two Doors at Once.” He teaches an annual science journalism workshop at the National Centre for Biological Sciences in Bangalore, India.

Bethany Brookshire is a staff writer for Science News for Students, a digital magazine that covers the latest in scientific research for children ages 9 to 14. She is also a contributor to Science News magazine, and a host of the independent podcast Science for the People. She edited “Science Blogging: The Essential Guide,” published in 2016, and has contributed freelance work to Scientific American, Slate, The Guardian, and many other leading publications. She has a B.S. in Biology, a B.A. in Philosophy, and a Ph.D. in Physiology and Pharmacology.

John Fauber is an investigative medical reporter with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and the USA Today Network. His stories also appear in MedPage Today. Since 2009, Fauber’s work has focused on conflicts of interest in medicine. He has won more than 25 national journalism awards, leading to a special commendation for his consistent excellence from the Columbia Journalism Review. Fauber also was a major contributor to a series of stories on prion diseases in humans and animals that was selected as a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting in 2003.

Andrada Fiscutean is a science and technology journalist based in Romania. She has written about Eastern European hackers, journalists attacked with malware, and North Korean scientists. Her work has been featured in Nature, Ars Technica, Wired, Vice Motherboard, and ZDNet. She’s also editor-in-chief of ProFM radio, where she assembled a team of journalists who cover local news. In 2017, she won Best Feature Story at SuperScrieri, the highest award in Romanian journalism. Passionate about the history of technology, Fiscutean owns several home computers made in Eastern Europe during the 1980s.

Richard Fisher is managing editor of BBC.com features in London and editor of BBC Future, a science, health and technology features website aimed at international audiences. Through evidence-based analysis, original ideas, and human stories, BBC Future is dedicated to exploring how our world is changing. The site won a 2019 Webby award for “best writing (editorial).” Fisher also oversees the teams behind BBC Culture, the BBC’s global arts site, and BBC Reel, which features short-form factual video stories. Before that, he was a senior news editor and feature editor at New Scientist in London.

Tony Leys has worked at the Des Moines Register as an editor and reporter since 1988. He has been the newspaper’s main health care reporter since 2000, with a strong focus on mental health and health care policy. He also helps cover politics, including Iowa’s presidential caucus campaigns. Leys grew up in the Milwaukee area and graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is a national board member of the Association of Health Care Journalists.

Thiago Medaglia is an independent reporter for National Geographic Brazil, where he was previously an editor. Medaglia is also the founder of Ambiental Media, a Brazilian startup that transforms scientific content into accessible, compelling and innovative journalism products. An award-winning reporter and writer, he has published stories in several media outlets, such as ESPN Brazil, Mother Jones, Estadão, Folha de São Paulo, and others. He is coauthor of six books on environmental topics and was a 2015 fellow at the International Center for Journalists.

Sonali Prasad has degrees in both computer science and journalism. In 2016, she was a Google News Lab fellow and won a grant from the Brown Institute of Media Innovation to study coral reef health. She has reported on science and environment issues for publications such as the Guardian, Washington Post, Quartz, Mongabay, and Hakai Magazine. She was hired as an investigative reporter at the Columbia Journalism School’s Energy and Environment Project and her team’s work on the U.S. Export-Import Bank’s dirty fossil fuel investments won an ‘Honorable Mention’ at the Society of Environmental Journalist awards.

Molly Segal is an independent radio journalist based in Canada’s Rocky Mountains. Her documentaries and reports on environment and science air on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s national radio programs — including Quirks & Quarks, Ideas, Tapestry, and The World This Weekend — as well as WHYY’s The Pulse and WBUR/NPR’s Here & Now. Molly has worked for CBC Radio/TV, stationed across Canada. Her work takes her to remote mountains looking for grizzlies, counting miniscule snails in ancient hot springs, and observing paleontologists looking for 500-million-year-old fossils. Molly is the host and producer of The Narwhal’s upcoming inaugural podcast, Undercurrent: Bear 148.

Eva Wolfangel is a German science journalist, focusing on future technologies such as artificial intelligence and virtual reality, computer science, data journalism, interaction between digital and real worlds, and space travel. She writes for major magazines and newspapers in Germany and Switzerland — including ZEIT, Geo, Spiegel, and NZZ — and produces radio features. As a VR reporter, she reports from virtual worlds as part of the journalistic cooperative RiffReporter. After several years as an editor, she became a freelance journalist in 2008. Eva’s specialty is to combine creative writing and technical topics in order to reach a broad audience. In 2018 she was named European Science Writer of the Year by the Association of British Science Writers. (Photo by Helena Ebel.)