Writers

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.

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 18^th-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.

Natalie Wolchover

Senior editor

Natalie Wolchover is a senior editor at Quanta Magazine covering the physical sciences. She has won several awards for her writing, including the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in Explanatory Reporting for “The Webb Space Telescope Will Rewrite Cosmic History. If It Works,” featured on Showcase, and CASW’s 2016 Evert Clark/Seth Payne Award for Young Science Journalists for a set of articles including “A Fight for the Soul of Science” and “Visions of Future Physics” (both also featured on Showcase). Wolchover studied physics at Tufts University and briefly at the University of California, Berkeley, before dropping out to become a science journalist. In 2023, she ran the Institute for Advanced Study’s first Science Journalism Workshop, which brought a talented international cohort of early-career science journalists to Princeton for a week of intense training. Wolchover lives in Queens, New York, with her wife and daughter. She is currently hard at work on her first book, about the search for the unified theory of nature.

Eva Wolfangel

Science Journalist

Eva Wolfangel is a German science journalist, focusing on future technologies such as artificial intelligence and virtual reality, computer science, data journalism, interaction between digital and real worlds, and space travel. She writes for major magazines and newspapers in Germany and Switzerland — including ZEIT, Geo, Spiegel and NZZ — and produces radio features. As a VR reporter, she reports from virtual worlds as part of the journalistic cooperative RiffReporter. After several years as an editor, she became a freelance journalist in 2008. Eva’s specialty is to combine creative writing and technical topics in order to reach a broad audience. In 2018 she was named European Science Writer of the Year by the Association of British Science Writers. Her story, “Who Was That?” (featured on Showcase), is one of the many stories that received that award. Currently she is a Knight Science Journalism Fellow at MIT. (Photo by Helena Ebel.)

Ed Yong

Science Writer

Ed Yong is a science journalist who reports for The Atlantic and is based in Washington, DC. His work has featured in National Geographic, The New Yorker, Wired, and more. He has won a variety of awards, including the National Academies Keck Science Communication Award. I Contain Multitudes, his first book, became a New York Times bestseller and inspired an online film series, an anthology of plays, and a clue on Jeopardy. He has a Chatham Island black robin named after him. Follow him on Twitter @edyong209.

His story “North Atlantic Right Whales Are Dying in Horrific Ways” is featured on Showcase as a Storygram. 

Mariano Zafra

Graphics Editor

Mariano Zafra is a senior graphics editor at Reuters Graphics, where he contributes to one of the most awarded teams in the world. Prior to this, from 2019 to 2023, he led the graphic and storytelling team at El País in Madrid. Before that, he spent four years as a graphics reporter for special projects at The Wall Street Journal and started and led the Infographic and Data Visualization Department of Univision News in Miami. Before moving to the United States, Zafra dedicated 14 years to working at two of the most prominent national daily newspapers in Spain: El Mundo and El País.

His work has been recognized with the AAAS Kavli Science Journalism Award (2021), the Ortega y Gasset Journalism Award (2021), and “The Best of Show” at the Malofiej Infographics Awards for the globally recognized visual article “A room, a bar and a classroom: how the coronavirus is spread through the air” (featured on Showcase). He has also won more than 40 international awards, including honors from the Society for News Design, NH, and Malofiej.