From the announcement:

Science News is proud to name Celina Zhao as the inaugural winner of the $1,000 Starks-Murcutt Prize for Excellence in Science Journalism. The award honors an early-career Science News intern or fellow whose work adheres to strict standards of accuracy, fairness and understanding of the scientific method, while also making science accessible to the public through clear and engaging writing. Zhao, who holds a bachelor’s degree and a master’s degree from MIT, was honored for her story, How much energy does your AI prompt use? It depends.

“I’m thrilled that we are able to honor Celina Zhao as the first recipient of the Starks-Murcutt Prize for Excellence in Science Journalism,” said Nancy Shute, editor in chief of Science News Media Group. “She met and exceeded our high standards, and I know she will excel in her career as a science journalist.”

Is living on land dragging you down? Why not seek out advice from the depths below? In her newest book, Leaving the Ocean Was a Mistake, Cara Giaimo, ’15, offers advice and humorous life lessons from 60 real-life sea creatures, along with fun and quirky facts about their world.

Nuggets of wisdom include “it’s good to get it all out,” recommended by the fire-breathing shrimp who vomits bioluminescent goo when threatened, and “if you love someone, absorb them into your bloodstream,” from the fanfin anglerfish, who expresses love by fusing with its mate.

“Giaimo does a wonderful job engaging readers’ sense of wonder by introducing them to animals that they may have never encountered before, while also dispensing nuggets of advice to bring smiles to their faces,” Laura Nan Hargrove wrote about the book in the trade magazine, Library Journal. “…Ocean lovers and those in search of lighthearted self-help will enjoy this unusual advice book.”

Cara Giaimo is also the author of Atlas Obscura: Wild Life (2024) and coauthor of Detector Dogs, Dynamite Dolphins, and More Animals with Super Sensory Powers (2022) with Christina Couch, ’15.

You can get your copy of Leaving the Ocean Was a Mistake at Bookshop.org and wherever books are sold.

Congratulations to James Dinneen, ’22, for winning a 2025 NASW Science in Society Journalism Award. James landed the prize in the Science Reporting category for his story, “Drought Has Hit the Panama Canal Hard – Can It Survive Climate Change?” Published last February in New Scientist Magazine, the piece chronicled how one of the world’s most important shipping routes is affected by and coping with fluctuations in water supply.

“A difficulty of covering climate change is illustrating this catastrophic phenomenon that is invisible to the human eye,” the judges said. Dinner “overcomes this barrier by focusing on climate change’s impacts. The story braids together the visible impacts of long-term drought on the Panama Canal with the climate science that undergirds the drought, and the economic and social consequences if we allow climate change to continue unchecked.”

James is an environment reporter at New Scientist and has bylines in Quanta Magazine, National Geographic, Undark Magazine, The Boston Globe, bioGraphic, Science, and many more publications. He was a finalist for a 2022 National Magazine Award and won the American Society of Journalists and Authors award for investigative journalism.

Congratulations, James! You can read about all of the Science in Society award winners here.

Congratulations to Sophie Hartley, ’24, for winning the 2025 John M. Collier Award for Forest History Journalism. Sponsored by the Forest History Society, the award honors journalistic works on forest or conservation history.

Sophie’s winning story—“In New England, A Tree-Killing Worm May Spell the End of Autumn’s Yellow Hues”—was published in Globe Magazine and showcases the unique scientific mechanisms of Beech leaf disease and why this disease poses such an enormous threat to US forests.

“With deep reporting on both lab science and forest management, Hartley makes a compelling case for the cause of saving the Beech tree on an international level,” judges wrote.

Sophie is currently an environmental and natural sciences reporter at The Indianapolis Star. Her work can also be found in bioGraphic, Science Friday, Science News, Scientific American, and Sierra Magazine, among other outlets. Congratulations, Sophie!

Interested in applying to the MIT Graduate Program in Science Writing? Join us for our fall admissions information webinar. Faculty and staff will give an overview of the curriculum, financial aid, and admissions procedures, and will answer questions from viewers. Details for the event are here:

The MIT Graduate Program in Science Writing Information Webinar

Friday, November 21 at 3pm. 

Watch the information session here.

Congratulations to Alex Ip, ’24, for being named a finalist for the Emerging Leader of the Year Award from the Institute for Nonprofit News (INN). The award honors one person who is an “emerging luminary” in their field and who has less than five years of experience in executive leadership. Past winners include Maple Walker Lloyd, the director of development and community engagement at the nonprofit news site, Block Club Chicago; Ryan Sorrell, founder and publisher of the digital news startup, The Kansas City Defender; and Kimberly Griffin, publisher and chief revenue officer of the Mississippi Free Press nonprofit newsroom.

Alex landed a finalist spot thanks to his work as founder, publisher, and editor of The Xylom, the only Asian American-run news outlet in the US dedicated to science and environmental coverage. His reporting on Atlanta’s “Cop City” training campus led to him winning the Atlanta Press Club’s 2024 Rising Star Award. Alex was also a finalist for the Good Trouble Honors, which recognizes leaders who take risks and create positive disruptions to bolster social and economic well-being in Atlanta, Georgia, and a finalist for the Transparency Award, which is given to individuals or organizations that make information understandable and accessible to local communities.

The INN’s Emerging Leader of the Year Award and all of the 2025 Nonprofit News Awards will be announced on Wednesday, September 10. Congratulations, Alex!

Congratulations to Emma Foehringer Merchant, ’22, for being named a Climate Economics Journalism Fellow by the New York University Climate Finance Initiative. Dedicated to helping journalists understand the financial mechanisms that shape climate policy and interventions, the fellowship brings 34 reporters from across the globe together for a two-day intensive workshop that covers the economics of climate regulation, renewable energy markets, legislative trends in climate finance, and how climate change influences financial stability worldwide. Instructors hail from a broad array of backgrounds and expertise, including economists, journalists, and legal and policy experts.

Emma is a longtime climate and energy reporter and a contributing writer at Inside Climate News. Her bylines can be found in Bloomberg Businessweek, Boston Globe Magazine, Grist, MIT Technology Review, The New Republic, Undark Magazine, and The Washington Post, among other publications.

The fellowship meets this year in New York City on September 18 and 19. Congratulations, Emma.

Congratulations to Jessica Chomik-Morales, ’25, for being one of 23 winners to receive a Spreading Love Through the Media Grant. Awarded by the University of California, Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center, which studies the psychology, sociology, and neuroscience of wellbeing, the grants were created to support print and multimedia reporting projects that explore “innovative nonfiction stories on love.”

Selected from a pool of 1,350 submissions, winning projects range from a feature-length article about a Sri Lankan game that honors one of the country’s most famous love stories, to a social media campaign that encourages Ethiopians to share what they love about other ethnic groups, to a podcast for kids that explores the science of hugs, friendship, and love.

Jessica’s project, “The Science of Love,” is a nine-part audio podcast series hosted by Scientific American. Each episode will “explore love through a scientific lens—uncovering its origins, mechanisms, and profound influence on human life” and will take listeners “into laboratories, across cultural boundaries, and into the deeply personal moments where love is formed, tested, and transformed.”

Jessica is no stranger to podcasting. She is the longtime host and creator of the Spanish language podcast Mi Última Neurona, which features a broad spectrum of Hispanic neuroscientists and is currently in its fourth season.

You can read about all of the Spreading Love Through the Media Grant winners here. Congratulations, Jessica!

In her first book, A Year With Seals: Unlocking the Secrets of the Sea’s Most Controversial Creatures, environmental writer Alix Morris presents an under-reported side of conservation science: efforts that work. Taking a solutions journalism approach, Alix chronicles a year spent following seals throughout North America—from fishing towns on the coasts of Maine to Indigenous communities in Washington state—capturing their intelligence, playfulness, struggles, and ecosystem impacts in the process.

“Morris, a masterful storyteller, has done full justice to these creatures of the deep,” says Kirkus Reviews, which gave the book a starred review. “…A wondrous look at our love-hate relationship with the most human of animals.”

Publisher’s Weekly agreed: “Morris’s evenhanded perspective eschews easy answers, finding instead a knotty parable about humanity’s struggle to live within a natural world that people profoundly shape without ever achieving the absolute control they desire. Philosophical and impressively reported, this enthralls.”

In addition to her book, Alix’s writing has also appeared in the Boston Globe Magazine, Smithsonian, Sierra Magazine, MIT Technology Review, Down East Magazine, and elsewhere. She holds graduate degrees in science writing from MIT and global health from Johns Hopkins University.

A Year With Seals hits shelves on July 15. You can pre-order your copy here.

Congratulations to Pratik Pawar and Celina Zhao, both from the Class of ’25, for being named Diversity Summer Fellows by the National Association of Science Writers (NASW). Dedicated to providing supplemental support for young journalists completing internships or fellowships over the summer, the program offers each fellow $3,000 in additional funding as well as a one-year NASW membership, mentoring opportunities, and professional development resources.

Celina Zhao is currently completing a summer internship at Science News, where she’s covering a broad spectrum of scientific subjects, including stories on the computational science behind random number generation and the physics underlying a killer move in squash games.

Pratik Pawar is currently a Future Perfect Fellow at Vox where he is covering global health issues.

Congratulations, Celina and Pratik!

After tackling Isaac Newton’s hidden detective work, the hunt for a “missing” planet, and the South Sea financial catastrophe, GPSW Professor Tom Levenson is turning his attention to the tiny. In his new book, So Very Small: How Humans Discovered the Microcosmos, Defeated Germs—And May Still Lose the War Against Infectious Disease, Levenson dives into the history of germ theory, and all of the ingenuity and hubris that helped and hindered its discovery.

The book has garnered widespread praise, including a starred review in Kirkus and positive reviews in The New York Review of Books, which called it “an elegant, wide-ranging history of the centuries-long quest to discover the critical role of germs in disease that reveals as much about human reasoning—and the pitfalls of ego—as it does about microbes.”

So Very Small is Tom’s seventh book on science and the history of science. He has also made 10 feature-length documentaries and has won several awards for his work, including the Walter P. Kistler Science Documentary Film Award, the Peabody Award (shared), a New York Chapter Emmy, and the AAAS/Westinghouse Award.

You can grab your copy of So Very Small here or at your favorite bookstore.

Congratulations to Sarah Hopkins, ’24, for being selected as a 2025–2026 Report for America corps member. Through the program, Sarah joined Open Vallejo, a nonprofit newsroom in California that covers issues around crime, justice, and public interest, as an investigative reporter.

Prior to joining Report for America, Sarah was a reporting fellow at Inside Climate News, where she covered a wide array of environmental justice issues, and an investigative editorial intern at FRONTLINE, where she contributed to documentaries that examined poverty in the United States and Joe Biden’s decision to withdraw from the 2024 Presidential race. She has also worked as a writer, editor, and communicator for social justice organizations, including the ACLU, where she translated complex legal concepts to non-expert audiences and to the media.

Congratulations, Sarah!