In the world of science journalism, a variety of fellowships offer opportunities to build skills, network, and find story ideas. Several programs invite journalists for a weekend, a month, or even a year. SFI’s Journalism Fellowship is one of a few that require fellows to put aside their journalism hats for an extended period to immerse themselves in learning. Applications for the 2025 CSSS Journalism Fellowship are open now through February 17, 2025.
When SFI’s Education and Communications teams sat down in 2019 to reimagine the Institute’s journalism fellowship, they landed on an idea that would be deeply educational, reflecting SFI’s multidisciplinary approach to learning and support of risky ideas, and unlike any other program for science journalists. Now entering its fourth year, the program invites two accomplished journalists with a proven record of covering complex-systems-related science to attend SFI’s iconic four-week Complex Systems Summer School (CSSS). The Fellows participate fully as students, learning about the latest developments in complex-systems science from world-renowned lecturers. After the summer school closes, the Fellows spend a final self-directed week at SFI’s Cowan Campus to interact with resident and visiting researchers.
“It's not often that journalists get to experience a summer school on such complex topics from the perspective of students and researchers,” says 2024 CSSS Journalism Fellow Anil Ananthaswamy. “It's invaluable to be part of such a cohort.” Ananthaswamy, former staff writer and deputy news editor at New Scientist, is also the award-winning author of many popular science books, including his most recent Why Machines Learn: The Elegant Math Behind Modern AI.
“There isn’t anywhere else you get to go to four weeks of summer camp and have access to such a wide range of subjects just handed to you, freshly prepared and ready to be turned into interesting work,” says 2024 CSSS Journalism Fellow Adam Becker, author of the critically-acclaimed book What is Real? The Unfinished Quest for the Meaning of Quantum Physics and the forthcoming More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley's Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity.
“If you want to be introduced to entirely new subjects that you didn't know were interesting in the first place, and to have that done in the best possible way — namely, by meeting people who are passionate about it and becoming friends with them — this is a better environment for that than any other fellowship I've ever heard of,” says Becker.
Having journalists participate in CSSS adds a unique perspective and skill set that benefits the other participants, says Suzanne Kern, SFI Director of Education. “For the advanced-level learning that happens in CSSS, it is essential to have a diverse set of thinkers — people at different stages of their education and career, people from different disciplines and trajectories. The Journalism Fellows contribute a distinctive expertise in communicating about complexity-science research.”
During their final self-directed week at SFI’s Cowan Campus, this year’s Journalism Fellows Becker and Ananthaswamy made the most of the opportunity to interact with resident and visiting researchers. They also gave presentations, read from their books, and engaged in deep conversations with SFI researchers — interactions that led to invitations to participate in future scientific workshops.
“It was fascinating to see two seasoned scientist/science journalists engage as serious students of complexity at the summer school," says SFI President David Krakauer. "I took away from this observation the, perhaps obvious, insight that learning is boundless, and perhaps more importantly, the admirable desire of Adam and Anil to get to the bottom of some of the most challenging ideas that science has to offer and work to develop new language to bring the most valuable of these ideas into the wider world.”
Often, the connections Journalism Fellows make at SFI persist and lead to new and ongoing collaborations and story ideas. When 2014–2015 Journalism Fellow Christie Aschwanden was developing a limited-series podcast through Scientific American on the topic of uncertainty last year, she returned to SFI for several days of interviews with multiple SFI researchers. Ideas sparked during 2022 CSSS Journalism Fellow Laura Spinney’s time at SFI led to a book, due out this coming year, as well as two stories — one exploring innovation and another on dating apps — in The Guardian and another on death and stability in ecosystems in New Scientist.
Read more, or apply for the 2025 Fellowship
Reflections from past Journalism Fellows
I appreciated how available the faculty made themselves but most of all I appreciated learning about complexity in the company of that dauntingly brilliant bunch, my fellow students at the summer school. It was often their questions that illuminated a previously obscure point for me, and their easy conversation — when they themselves came from such diverse domains — that revealed to me how creative interdisciplinary dialogue can be.
I had the idea for a book while at SFI, that is now written and will be published next spring. It isn't about complexity per se, but the research it describes is incredibly interdisciplinary and the idea came out of a conversation I had while sitting under a pagoda one evening, with those fellow students, on the campus of the Institute for American Indian Arts.
Participating in SFI's Complex Systems Summer School (as one of the journalism fellows in 2022) was like an accelerated boot camp for learning about some of the most important topics within complexity science — things like nonlinear systems, chaos, network theory, and more. As well, it gave me the chance to speak with SFI faculty members one on one, a truly valuable experience. And on top of that, it was great to meet so many young scientists, many of whom are now making waves in complexity science and related fields.
My journalism fellowship at SFI was one of the most influential experiences of my career. It opened my mind to new ideas and connections between disparate fields of science. My time at SFI was instrumental in shaping much of the reporting I did at FiveThirtyEight on the process of science and the people I've met and interviewed at SFI greatly influenced my thinking about uncertainty, which eventually became a podcast series for Scientific American (titled Uncertain). SFI is a welcoming place to explore new ideas and make new connections, and I visit every opportunity I get. Over time, SFI has come to feel like my intellectual home. I come away each time with new insights and understandings.
Participating in SFI's journalism fellowship has significantly enriched my approach to science journalism. Too often I have found myself entrenched in single-discipline silos when reporting on a research topic; the lessons I learned at SFI have helped me develop broader and more complex perspectives to thinking about the scope and limitations of science. SFI has informed multiple stories and conversations with editors over the years about richly multidisciplinary topics.