We are delighted to introduce our newest early-career fellows, Celia Ford, Shi En Kim, and Pratik Pawar. With generous support from the Burroughs Wellcome Fund, Celia, Kim, and Pratik will each spend ten months working with individual mentors and the TON editorial team to report and write articles on the craft of science journalism for The Open Notebook.
Over the past eight years, our fellows have written more than 85 stories for TON, which have been read by tens of thousands of people in almost every country in the world; you can read stories by previous fellows here. The science writing community will get to know Celia, Kim, and Pratik in the coming months, but for now, here’s a little bit about each of them:
Celia Ford is a fifth-year PhD candidate in neuroscience at the University of California, Berkeley’s Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute. She studies how our brains make sense of the world, and how we update our expectations when the world changes. Celia writes for the Berkeley Science Review and produces/hosts podcasts at Carry the One Radio and NeuroCinema, where she’s communicated about everything from generative art to swimming robots. She loves meeting fascinating people and inhaling wild discoveries, and she looks forward to growing as a science writer during her fellowship. In a past life, she was a drive-time alt-rock DJ at 95.5 WBRU FM. In a parallel universe, she is a pole dance instructor (and evangelist), bass guitarist, and devoted cat parent. You can follow her on Twitter @cogcelia.
Shi En Kim is a freelance science writer who writes just about anything that sparks her fancy. Her work has appeared in National Geographic, Scientific American, Hakai Magazine, Science News, and other outlets. She was an editor for Massive Science and a 2021 AAAS Mass Media Fellow at Smithsonian Magazine. During non-pandemic times, Kim enjoys saber fencing and backpacking across alpine terrains—starkly different landscapes from the Malaysian tropics where she was born. She is currently finishing up her PhD in molecular engineering at the University of Chicago, studying in the physics of nanosized objects. Follow her on Twitter @goes_by_kim.
Pratik Pawar is an independent science journalist who writes about medicine and public health, ecology, and science policy. He lives in Bangalore, India. Pratik’s work has appeared in Discover, Science News, The Washington Post, and The Wire, among other publications. Follow him on Twitter @pratikmpawar.
Fellowship Mentors
We’re also thrilled to welcome three new mentors to our fellowship community. Mentors meet weekly with fellows for the duration of their fellowship, providing advice and guidance as the fellows plan, report, and write their fellowship stories and offering other career-development support and comradeship.
Sabrina Imbler will be Celia’s mentor. They are a writer and science journalist based in Brooklyn. They are currently a reporting fellow on the science and health desk of The New York Times. Their chapbook Dyke (geology) was published in 2020 with Black Lawrence Press and their essay collection, How Far the Light Reaches, is forthcoming with Little, Brown in December, 2022. Follow Sabrina on Twitter @aznfusion.
Sarah Gilman will be Kim’s mentor. Sarah is a Washington State-based writer and illustrator who covers the environment, natural history, and place, and a contributing editor for Hakai and bioGraphic magazines. Her work has appeared in The Atlantic, Audubon, Hakai Magazine, High Country News, The Washington Post, Smithsonian, and others. Follow her on Twitter @Sarah_Gilman.
Nidhi Subbaraman will be Pratik’s mentor for the first half of his fellowship. Nidhi is a science reporter at The Wall Street Journal. She has previously been a staff reporter at Nature, BuzzFeed News, and The Boston Globe. She’s covered a range of health and science topics and is interested in the social impact of research and science policy. Nidhi majored in biochemistry and has a master’s degree in science writing from MIT. Follow her on Twitter @NidhiSubs.
Stephanie M. Lee will be Pratik’s mentor for the second half of his fellowship. Stephanie is a reporter at BuzzFeed News, where she writes feature and investigative stories about science, health, and medicine. Before joining in 2015, she was a reporter at the San Francisco Chronicle. Her work has been anthologized in The Best American Food Writing and noted in The Best American Science and Nature Writing. She majored in comparative literature at the University of California, Berkeley, and lives in San Francisco. Follow her on Twitter @stephaniemlee.
We’re proud to be working with this talented group of journalists. Please join us in welcoming them all to the TON team!
