The chosen fellows — Flora Alfiero, Stefany Hernández Arrieta, Andrea Carolina Obaid Carrion, Gary Hartley, Nuria Martinez, Sandrine Mary, Matthew McGrath, Candela Obradors, Jelena Prtoric, and Chiara Sabelli — will undertake residencies across eight European countries: Austria, Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom. Each journalist will be awarded a grant to pursue in-depth reporting on frontier science during a residency lasting three to five months.
Their journalistic projects tackle earthquakes and fusion energy, quantum mechanics and human evolution, neural repair and the ethics of disobedience, water conflict and invasive species, biodiversity loss and the energy transition.
The cohort brings together nine different nationalities from across Europe and the Americas, and includes three early-career, three mid-career, and four established professionals. FRONTIERS congratulates the new awardees and thanks all who applied during the programme's four-year run.
Additional information about the FRONTIERS fellows for the fourth call
● Flora Alfiero (Italian)
Host Institution: IHE Delft Institute for Water Education, Netherlands
Project title: Covering Water Wars: Media, Science and the Politics of Hydro-Conflict in the Horn of Africa
● Stefany Hernández Arrieta (Colombian)
Host Institution: Instituto Superior Técnico, University of Lisbon, Portugal
Project title: Taming the light: Igniting the future of nuclear fusion
● Andrea Carolina Obaid Carrion (Chilean)
Host Institution: Institute for Bioengineering of Catalonia (IBEC), Spain
Project title: Can Bioengineering End Paralysis? Inside the Frontier Lab Rebuilding the Spine
● Gary Hartley (British)
Host Institution: Department of Biodiversity Monitoring @ Natural History Museum Stuttgart, Germany
Project title: Across borders: living with Europe’s travelling invertebrates
● Nuria Marquez Martinez (Mexican)
Host Institution: Ghent University, Belgium
Project title: The Righteous Brain: Why some humans are wired to disobey
● Sandrine Mary (French)
Host Institution: Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information (IQOQI), Austria
Project title: The Meaning Hunters: inside the quest to understand quantum mechanics
● Matthew McGrath (Irish)
Host Institution: Cardiff University, UK
Project title: Flying on dead donkeys: the unintended consequences of the global clean energy transition
● Candela Antón de Vez Obradors (Spanish)
Host Institution: EVO ADAPTA, Spain
Project title: How to Narrate the Uncertain?
● Jelena Prtoric (Croatian)
Host Institution: German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research Halle-Jena-Leipzig (iDiv), Germany
Project title: Predicting biodiversity changes and communicating uncertainty around it
● Chiara Sabelli (Italian)
Host Institution: ETH Zurich – Department of Earth and Planetary Science, Switzerland
Project title: To understand earthquakes, scientists are learning how to trigger them
About FRONTIERS
FRONTIERS is the science journalism initiative funded by the European Research Council in 2023. The project allows science journalists to cover frontier science topics within research institutions, ensuring journalistic independence. FRONTIERS aims to tackle some of the challenges of science journalism, including the deteriorating employment conditions and resources available for science journalists. For more information on the FRONTIERS project, visit www.frontiers.media.
Funded by the European Union (EU) through the European Research Council (ERC) grant FRONTIERS, nr 101121863. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the EU or the ERC Executive Agency. Neither the EU nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them. The subgrants are not given by the EU or the ERC.