Saima Sidik awarded Taylor/Blakeslee mentored science journalism project fellowship

Saima Sidik (@saimamaysidik) has been awarded a 2022 Taylor/Blakeslee Mentored Science Journalism Project Fellowship. The grant from CASW will support a reporting project exploring how a scientist and an Indigenous community are working together to understand impacts of climate change.

Sidik, a freelance science writer based in Somerville, MA who won a 2020 Taylor/Blakeslee Graduate Fellowship to attend MIT’s Graduate Program in Science Writing, will benefit from the mentorship of science journalist Amy McDermott.

McDermott is associate editor of Front Matter, the magazine section of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. McDermott’s work has appeared in Science, Science News, Discover, Grist, and The Atlantic. A 2015 Taylor/Blakeslee Graduate Fellow, McDermott received the first Taylor/Blakeslee project fellowship in 2016.

The project fellowship, which is awarded competitively to a current or recent Taylor/Blakeslee Graduate Fellow, offers a small grant for an independent reporting project and comes with the support of a senior journalist as mentor. The program is designed to help early-career science journalists gain important experience by organizing and executing freelance projects at a time when publishers are rarely able to cover the full cost of field reporting of science stories. The mentoring component is intended to help ensure the success of the project and also to build a cross-generational network within the community of Taylor/Blakeslee Fellows.

The project grants are funded by the Chicago-based Brinson Foundation, which provides underwriting for the Taylor/Blakeslee Graduate Fellowships.