We are excited to introduce our newest early-career fellows, Kate Fishman, Emma Gometz, and Claudia López-Lloreda. With generous support from the Burroughs Wellcome Fund, Kate, Emma, and Claudia 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 nine years, our fellows have written more than 115 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 Kate, Emma, and Claudia in the coming months, but for now, here’s a little bit about each of them:
Kate Fishman is a freelance journalist based in San Diego, California. Her career in local news has taken her from Ohio to Pennsylvania to California’s Mendocino County, where she covered environmental regulation and natural resources as a Report for America corps member and cultivated a love for writing about ecology. Her science and environmental reporting has appeared in Sierra Magazine, Reuters, and Atmos, among other publications. She also produces and hosts an interview podcast about loneliness, makes coffees, and loves to dance. Find her on Bluesky, X, or Instagram.
Emma Gometz is a digital producer at Science Friday, where she writes newsletters and web articles, helps develop audience strategy, and contributes to the visual artistic direction of the website. Previously, she was a newsletter writer for the Atlantic Theater Company, and a podcast research intern for Offscrip Media. She’s also a performance artist, writes a blog about junk food, a memoir cartoonist, and self identifies as “fruity.” She graduated with a BA in ecology, evolution, and environmental biology from Columbia University in 2021. Follow her on X @monkey_cabinet.
Claudia López Lloreda is a science journalist with a focus on neuroscience, mental health, and psychology. She received her bachelor’s degree in cellular-molecular biology from the University of Puerto Rico, Rio Piedras, and her PhD in neuroscience from the University of Pennsylvania. She was the 2021 Mass Media Fellow at STAT, worked as a news intern for Science and is now a full-time freelancer. Her work has also appeared in Wired, Undark, Scientific American, Smithsonian Magazine, and Science News. She is currently based in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Follow her on X @claulopezneuro.
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.
Sarah Gilman will be Kate’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. She writes a quarterly illustrated essay for YES! Magazine called Terra Affirma, and her written work has appeared in The Atlantic, Audubon, High Country News, Adventure Journal Quarterly, The Washington Post, Smithsonian, and others. You can also find her words in the Best American Science and Nature Writing and Best Women’s Travel Writing anthologies, and her drawings on the covers and pages of several mass-market non-fiction books. Follow her on X @Sarah_Gilman or check out her art at Hidden Drawer Designs on Etsy.
Kristin Ozelli will be Emma’s mentor. Kristin is deputy editor of The Transmitter, a new editorially independent publication from the Simons Foundation for the neuroscience community. Previously, she was the deputy editor and features editor at Spectrum, a senior editor at Scientific American Mind, and a staff writer and the online editorial director of Scientific American. She has also worked at the Natural History Museum in London and written a book about Jupiter’s moons, published by W.W. Norton. Kristin has an M.A. in journalism from New York University and B.S. degrees in both English and mathematics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Find her on LinkedIn.
Bill Andrews will be Claudia’s mentor. Bill is a senior editor at Quanta Magazine in New York City, where he leads the coverage of theoretical computer science. Before that he was an editor at Discover and Astronomy magazines, where he focused on space, physics and math stories. Bill has a master’s degree in journalism from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, a bachelor’s in writing from MIT, and he was born and raised in Bayamón, Puerto Rico. Follow him on X @unique9881.
We’re proud to be working with this talented group of journalists. Please join us in welcoming them all to the TON team!