Writers

Award winners whose work is featured in Showcase

Hester van Santen

Staff Writer at NRC Media

Hester van Santen is a staff writer at NRC Media, the publishing company of the Dutch daily newspapers NRC Handelsblad and nrc.next. Van Santen has worked at the NRC science desk for 12 years, specializing in life sciences. Her articles cover a diverse range of topics, from food science and biodiversity to human physiology and scholarly publishing.  In 2017, she was named European Science Writer of the Year by the Association of British Science Writers for her story “Peer Review Post-Mortem: How a Flawed Aging Study was Published in Nature” (featured on Showcase). The jury characterized her work as “remarkably well researched” and “full of creativity.” Last September, van Santen took up a new position at NRC. She now covers energy and sustainability at the economy & finance desk. Van Santen holds an MSc in Biology and Journalism from the University of Groningen.

Erik Vance

Science Writer

Erik Vance is a native Bay Area writer replanted in Mexico as a non-native species. Before becoming a writer he was, at turns, a biologist, a rock climbing guide, an environmental consultant, and an environmental educator. His work focuses on the human element of science — the people who do it, those who benefit from it, and those who do not. He has written for The New York Times, Nature, Scientific American, Harper’s, National Geographic, and a number of other local and national outlets. His Discover story “Why Nothing Works” (featured on Showcase) won the NASW Science in Society Award in 2015 and inspired his first book, Suggestible You, about how the mind and body continually twist and shape our realities. 

Madhumita Venkataramanan

Journalist, Editor and Speaker

Madhumita Venkataramanan is a UK-based journalist, editor and speaker with expertise in the fields of science, health and technology. As the European Technology Correspondent at the Financial Times, she writes news and features around themes of tech, science and innovation. She was previously head of the Telegraph‘s technology section, where she oversaw the newspaper’s technology coverage and has written longform features around data privacy, security and other major science and tech trends for publications such as Wired and BBC Future. Her Wired story “My Identity For Sale” (featured on Showcase) won CASW’s Evert Clark/Seth Payne award for young science journalists in 2015.

Lizzie Wade

Freelance Science Journalist

Lizzie Wade is a freelance science journalist and a contributing correspondent for Science magazine. She covers archaeology, anthropology, and all things Latin America from her home in Mexico City. Her writing has also appeared in Aeon, California Sunday, Wired,and Slate, among others. Her story “Cradle of Life” (featured on Showcase), about the debate over the Amazon rainforest’s deep past, won the 2016 Walter Sullivan Award for Excellence in Science Journalism—Features from the American Geophysical Union. Follow Lizzie on Twitter @lizzie_wade.

Adam Wagner

Environmental reporter

Adam Wagner covers climate change and other environmental issues in North Carolina. His work is produced with financial support from the Hartfield Foundation and Green South Foundation, in partnership with Journalism Funding Partners, as part of an independent journalism fellowship program. His reporting for the investigative series Big Poultry (featured on Showcase) has won national journalism awards.

Annie Waldman

Reporter

Annie Waldman is a reporter at ProPublica covering education. She graduated with honors from the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism and the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia, where she was the recipient of the Pulitzer Traveling Fellowship and the Brown Institute Computational Journalism Award. Her stories have been published in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Vice, BBC News, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and Consumer Reports. Her documentary short film on the lives of homeless high school students after Hurricane Katrina appeared in the Sundance Film Festival and was later broadcast nationally on PBS. Her story “How Hospitals Are Failing Black Mothers” (featured on Showcase) was part of ProPublica and NPR’s Lost Mothers series, which won a Peabody Award and a National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine Communication Award. Follow her on Twitter at @anniewaldman.

Craig Welch

Environmental Journalist

Craig Welch is an environmental journalist for National Geographic, where he writes about everything from ocean change to African wildlife. He previously covered environmental issues in the Pacific Northwest for 15 years at The Seattle Times, where he was part of a team that won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for breaking news for its coverage of the deadliest landslide in American history. His environmental reporting has been honored by the Overseas Press Club, the Online News Association, the Sidney Hillman Foundation, and the Society of Environmental Journalists. His Seattle Times story “Sea Change” (featured on Showcase) won the National Academies Communication Award in 2014 for the online category.

 

Sarah Wild

Science Journalist

Sarah Wild is an award-winning science journalist. She studied physics, electronics, and English literature at Rhodes University in an effort to make herself unemployable. It didn’t work, so she read for an MSc in bioethics and health law (Wits University), with a special focus on race science and the philosophy of science. She has been a science editor at both Business Day and the Mail & Guardian. Wild has written about astronomy, particle physics, and everything in between, and she’s published two books about science in South Africa: Searching African Skies: The Square Kilometre Array and South Africa’s Quest to Hear the Songs of the Stars and Innovation: Shaping South Africa through Science. Her series of stories about unidentified bodies in South Africa (featured on Showcase) won the 2017 AAAS/Kavli Science Journalism Gold Award in the Small Newspaper category. Follow her on Twitter at @sarahemilywild.

Kale Williams

Science and environment reporter

Kale Williams is a science and environment reporter at The Oregonian/OregonLive. His series “The Loneliest Polar Bear” (featured on Showcase) won numerous accolades including the Scripps Howard award for environmental journalism, first place in the features category from the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the story was a finalist for excellence in writing from the American Society of News Editors. Williams also won a regional Emmy Award for the 30-minute documentary that accompanied the series. He worked for almost a decade as a house painter in the Bay Area, where he was born and raised, before joining the San Francisco Chronicle as a breaking news reporter in 2013. He lives in Portland, Oregon, with his wife Rebecca and their menagerie of pets. Follow him on Twitter @sfkale

Alexandra Witze

Science Journalist

Alexandra Witze is a contributing correspondent for Nature and Science News magazines. She writes news and features, primarily about the earth sciences, from her base in Boulder, Colorado. With her husband Jeff Kanipe, she is the author of Island on Fire, a book about the extraordinary 18th-century eruption of the Icelandic volcano Laki (Pegasus Books, 2015). Alex is a nationally known science writer whose awards include top journalism prizes from the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Geophysical Union, the American Institute of Physics, and the National Association of Science Writers. Her Nature story “The 24/7 Search for Killer Quakes” (featured on Showcase) won the AAAS Kavli Science Journalism Award in 2015 for the magazine category.