We are so excited to introduce our newest slate of early-career fellows, Elise Cutts, Xilena Pinedo, and Rohini Subrahmanyam. With generous support from the Burroughs Wellcome Fund, Elise, Xilena, and Rohini will each spend the next year working with individual mentors and the TON editorial team to report and write articles on the craft of science journalism for The Open Notebook. Together with their mentors, this cohort spans a large swath of the globe, hailing from four continents.
Over the past 11 years, our fellows have written more than 140 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 our previous fellows here. The science writing community will get to know Elise, Xilena, and Rohini in the coming months, but for now, here’s a little bit about each of them:
Elise Cutts is a U.S.-American freelance science journalist based in Graz, Austria. Her news and feature writing on planets, physical science, and themes of emergence, form, and scale appear in Quanta, Scientific American, Science News, New Scientist, and other magazines. She also writes a blog called Reviewer, too about open questions at the frontiers of science. Elise is a TON early-career fellow sponsored by the Burroughs Wellcome Fund. Find her on Bluesky and LinkedIn or at elisecutts.com.
Xilena Pinedo is a Peruvian science journalist covering health, environmental issues, and climate change in Latin America. Her reporting focuses on environmental justice and the relationship between scientific research, public policy, and Indigenous knowledge. She speaks Spanish, English, and Portuguese. Xilena is a TON early-career fellow sponsored by the Burroughs Wellcome Fund. Follow her on X and Instagram.
Fellowship Mentors
We’re also thrilled to welcome two new mentors to our fellowship community and welcome back Sarah Gilman, who is returning for her fifth consecutive term as a mentor. Fellowship 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.
Anil Ananthaswamy will be Elise’s mentor. Anil is an award-winning science writer, author, and former deputy news editor at New Scientist. His writing, spanning cosmology, quantum theory, computational neuroscience and AI, has appeared in Quanta, Scientific American, Nature, and other publications. He is the author of four books, most recently Why Machines Learn: The Elegant Math Behind Modern AI (2024). An alumnus of IIT Madras, the University of Washington, and UC Santa Cruz, Anil worked as a software engineer before becoming a science writer. He was a 2019-20 MIT Knight Science Journalism Fellow. He received a distinguished alumnus award from, and is currently a Professor of Practice at IIT Madras.
Sarah Gilman will be Xilena’s mentor. Sarah is a Washington state-based writer, illustrator, and editor who covers the environment, natural history, and place. Her work has appeared in The Atlantic, Sierra, Audubon, High Country News, Adventure Journal Quarterly, The Washington Post, Smithsonian, and others, and she wrote the quarterly column Terra Affirma for YES! Magazine. You can find her comics and illustrated essays on her newsletter of the same name on Substack. You can also find her words in the Best American Science and Nature Writing, Best Women’s Travel Writing, and Water Bodies anthologies, and her drawings on the covers and pages of several non-fiction books. Find Sarah on Bluesky or check out her art at Hidden Drawer Designs on Etsy.
Kamala Thiagarajan will be Rohini’s mentor. Kamala is an independent journalist based in Madurai, South India, with over two decades of reporting experience. Her work explores science, climate change, environmental policy, and public health. She has reported from across Asia, with bylines in The New York Times, NPR, The Guardian, the British Medical Journal, BBC, Hakai Magazine, Al Jazeera, Bloomberg News, South China Morning Post, Atlas Obscura, Reader’s Digest, Undark, Nikkei Asia, The National, and The Christian Science Monitor, among others. She’s the recipient of the 2025 June L. Biedler Prize for Cancer Journalism, awarded by the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR), and is a Pulitzer Center grantee. Kamala has also served as a mentor with The Open Notebook’s Sharon Dunwoody Science Journalism Program and the AAAS Mass Media Fellowship. She swears by two legal stimulants: bitter coffee and bright sunshine.
We’re proud to be working with this talented group of journalists. Please join us in welcoming them all to the TON team!