CSSS Journalism Fellowship
The Complex Systems Summer Journalism Fellowship is a prestigious five-week residential and immersive program that offers two accomplished journalists the opportunity to explore complex systems science more deeply. Open to national and international journalists, eligible candidates must have demonstrated interest in reporting on topics related to complex systems. Fellows receive a generous stipend for the duration of the Fellowship, including travel reimbursement.
During their residency in Santa Fe, Fellows are embedded in SFI’s iconic Complex Systems Summer School where they learn through an intensive series of lectures and labs taught by world-renowned faculty. At the end of the school, they have an additional reflective week at SFI’s main campus to interact with scientists and learn about the Institute. Armed with a new appreciation for the history of and trends in complex systems science, and the state and limitations of current scientific theory, the Fellows then return to their day-to-day reporting better prepared to convey the interrelatedness of solutions to the complex problems we face.
Applications for the 2025 CSSS Journalism Fellowship are now open through February 17, 2025.
Current Fellows
Anil Ananthaswamy is an award-winning science writer and former staff writer and deputy news editor for the London-based New Scientist magazine. He is a 2019-20 MIT Knight Science Journalism fellow. He organizes and teaches an annual science writing workshop at the National Centre for Biological Sciences in Bengaluru, India. Anil writes for regularly for New Scientist, Quanta, Scientific American, Nature, and has contributed to Nautilus, Matter, The Wall Street Journal, Discover and the UK’s Literary Review, among others. He is the author of three popular science books (The Edge of Physics, The Man Who Wasn’t There and Through Two Doors at Once). His next book, Why Machines Learn: The Elegant Math Behind Modern AI, will be published on July 16 by Dutton (Penguin Random House).
Adam Becker is an author, science journalist, and public speaker. He has written for the New York Times, the BBC, NPR, Scientific American, Quanta, New Scientist, Undark, and many other publications. His critically-acclaimed first book, What is Real? The Unfinished Quest for the Meaning of Quantum Physics, was longlisted for the 2018 PEN Literary Science Writing Award and shortlisted for Physics World’s Book of the Year. His second book, More Everything Forever, is a scientific and historical critique of unrealistic futures promulgated by the tech industry, forthcoming in April 2025 from Basic Books.
In addition to his writing, Adam has designed and coded multiple interactive online features, including a playable essay explaining Bell's Theorem. Adam has also appeared on numerous radio shows and podcasts, including Ologies with Alie Ward, KQED Forum, Sean Carroll’s Mindscape, and The Story Collider. Adam co-authored a script on incompleteness and the halting problem for Veritasium, a popular YouTube science channel; the resulting video has over 20 million views. He has also recorded an animated physics video series with the BBC.
Adam holds a Ph.D. in cosmology from the University of Michigan. He was a science journalist in residence at the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing in Spring 2023, and has previously held visiting positions at UC Berkeley and UC Irvine. He has received Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Book Grants to support the writing of What is Real? and More Everything Forever.