James Dinneen awarded 2023 Taylor/Blakeslee mentored science journalism project fellowship

James Dinneen (@jamesNESW) has been awarded a 2023 Taylor/Blakeslee Mentored Science Journalism Project Fellowship. The grant will support a reporting project focused on America’s aging nuclear energy infrastructure.

Dinneen is an environment reporter at New Scientist and received a 2021 Taylor/Blakeslee Graduate Fellowship to attend MIT’s Graduate Program in Science Writing. His writing has been published in Science, National Geographic, The Boston Globe, Scientific American, Undark, Discover, Yale E360, Wired, bioGraphic and Smithsonian, among other publications.

Zahra Hirji (@Zhirji28), climate reporter for Bloomberg Green, will provide project mentorship. Hirji previously wrote about environmental issues for BuzzFeed News, InsideClimate News, Discovery News, and Earth magazine and was a 2018 Ida B. Wells Fellow.

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. Mentoring is provided to help ensure the success of the project.

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