MBL awards journalism fellowships

Journalists selected for the MBL's new Polar Fellowship, created in conjunction with the International Polar Year, will travel to the foothills of Alaska's Brooks Range, site of an MBL field site at Toolik Lake. There they will participate in a weeklong hands-on course focusing on key science questions in polar research. Following the course, the journalists will team up with research scientists to work side-by-side with them in the field and laboratory. This winter, three Polar Fellows will spend an additional month with scientists studying the effects of climate change and ecosystem function at Palmer Station on the Antarctic Peninsula. The experience provides an unmatched opportunity to experience, compare, and contrast polar change and research conducted at both poles.

To date, the Science Journalism Program has granted fellowships to more than 250 journalists from a wide range of news organizations, including The New York Times, Science, National Public Radio, The Washington Post, CNN, and Scientific American. It is also gaining cachet with journalists overseas, and includes alumni from such far-reaching places as Africa, Brazil, Sweden, India, Japan, and the United Kingdom.

MBL visiting investigator and Northwestern University professor Dr. Robert D. Goldman, and Knight Science Journalism Program director and former Washington Post science editor, Boyce Rensberger, direct the Science Journalism Program. The Biomedical Hands-On Laboratory course is directed by Dr. Kerry Bloom of the University of North Carolina and the Polar Hands-On Laboratory course is directed by Dr. Christopher Neill, of the MBL's Ecosystems Center.

The 2008 MBL Science Journalism Program is supported in part by the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, the American Society for Cell Biology, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, FASEB, NASA, The New York Times Company Foundation, and the Society for Neuroscience. The Polar Fellowship is made possible through a grant from the National Science Foundation. For more information about the MBL's Science Journalism Program, visit www.mbl.edu/sjp.

The MBL is a leading international, independent, nonprofit institution dedicated to discovery and to improving the human condition through creative research and education in the biological, biomedical and environmental sciences. Founded in 1888 as the Marine Biological Laboratory, the MBL is the oldest private marine laboratory in the Western Hemisphere. For more information, visit www.MBL.edu