The Pulitzer Prizes are two dozen annual awards given by Columbia University in New York for achievements in the United States in "journalism, arts and letters." They were established in 1917 by the will of Joseph Pulitzer, who had made his fortune as a newspaper publisher.
The Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting has been presented since 1998, for a distinguished example of explanatory reporting that illuminates a significant and complex subject, demonstrating mastery of the subject, lucid writing and clear presentation. From 1985 to 1997, it was known as the Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Journalism.
Olivia P. Judson is a British evolutionary biologist and science writer. She is a former journalist for The Economist, a former online columnist for The New York Times and has published in a number of other publications, including National Geographic, The Atlantic and the Financial Times. Judson was a fellow of the Berlin Institute for Advanced Study in 2010–2011, and a Guggenheim fellow in 2020.
Stefan Rahmstorf is a German oceanographer and climatologist. Since 2000, he has been a Professor of Physics of the Oceans at Potsdam University. He studied physical oceanography at Bangor University and received his Ph.D. in oceanography from Victoria University of Wellington (1990). His work focuses on the role of ocean currents in climate change. He was one of the lead authors of the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report.
Deborah Leigh Blum is an American science journalist and the director of the Knight Science Journalism program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is the author of several books, including The Poisoner's Handbook (2010) and The Poison Squad (2018), and has been a columnist for The New York Times and a blogger, via her blog titled Elemental, for Wired.
Mike Dash is a Welsh writer, historian, and researcher. He has written books and articles about dramatic episodes in history.
Christopher Cole Mooney is an American journalist and author of four books including The Republican War on Science (2005). Mooney's writing focuses on subjects such as climate change denialism and creationism in public schools, and he has been described as "one of the few journalists in the country who specialize in the now dangerous intersection of science and politics." In 2020 he was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for a series of articles on global warming published in The Washington Post.
Sallie Watson "Penny" Chisholm is an American biological oceanographer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is an expert in the ecology and evolution of ocean microbes. Her research focuses particularly on the most abundant marine phytoplankton, Prochlorococcus, that she discovered in the 1980s with Rob Olson and other collaborators. She has a TED talk about their discovery and importance called "The tiny creature that secretly powers the planet".
The Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting is an American news media organization established in 2006 that sponsors independent reporting on global issues that other media outlets are less willing or able to undertake on their own. The center's goal is to raise the standard of coverage of international systemic crises and to do so in a way that engages both the broad public and government policy-makers. The organization is based in Washington, D.C.
Edward S. Boyden is an American neuroscientist and entrepreneur at MIT. He is the Y. Eva Tan Professor in Neurotechnology, and a full member of the McGovern Institute for Brain Research. He is recognized for his work on optogenetics and expansion microscopy. Boyden joined the MIT faculty in 2007, and continues to develop new optogenetic tools as well as other technologies for the manipulation and analysis of brain structure and activity. He received the 2015 Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences.
Richard O. Prum is an evolutionary biologist and ornithologist. He is the William Robertson Coe Professor of Ornithology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Yale University, as well as the head curator of vertebrate zoology at the university's Peabody Museum of Natural History. His 2017 book The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin’s Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World—and Us was named one of the 10 Best Books of 2017 by The New York Times and was a finalist for the 2018 Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction.
Walter Robert Mears was an American journalist, author, and educator. Mears worked for the Associated Press (AP) from 1956 until his retirement in 2001. In 1977, he won the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting for his coverage of the 1976 United States presidential election. After retirement, he taught journalism at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and at Duke University.
Jonathan Andrew Eisen is an American evolutionary biologist, currently working at University of California, Davis. His academic research is in the fields of evolutionary biology, genomics and microbiology and he is the academic editor-in-chief of the open access journal PLOS Biology.
Greg Ip is a Canadian-American journalist, currently the chief economics commentator for The Wall Street Journal. A native of Canada, Ip received a bachelor's degree in economics and journalism from Carleton University in Ottawa, Ontario. He lives in Bethesda, Maryland.
David Henry Gorski is an American surgical oncologist and professor of surgery at Wayne State University School of Medicine. He specializes in breast cancer surgery at the Karmanos Cancer Institute. Gorski is an outspoken skeptic and critic of alternative medicine and the anti-vaccination movement. He writes as Orac at Respectful Insolence and as himself at Science-Based Medicine, where he is the managing editor.
Matthieu Aikins is a Canadian-American journalist and author best known for his reporting on the war in Afghanistan. He is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine and a contributing editor at Rolling Stone, as well as a Puffin Foundation Fellow at the Type Media Center. He has also been a fellow at New America, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the American Academy in Berlin.
Houra Merrikh is an Iranian-American microbiologist. She is a full professor at Vanderbilt University in the Department of Biochemistry. Her field of work is antibiotic resistance and bacterial evolvability.
Liz Neeley is a science communicator, researcher, and founder of Liminal Creations. She was formerly the Executive Director of The Story Collider, a nonprofit organization that focuses on true, personal stories inspired by science. She began her career in marine biology and conservation and has since become an expert in the use of narrative storytelling for effective science communication.
Margaret McFall-Ngai is an American animal physiologist and biochemist best-known for her work related to the symbiotic relationship between Hawaiian bobtail squid, Euprymna scolopes and bioluminescent bacteria, Vibrio fischeri. Her research helped expand the microbiology field, primarily focused on pathogenicity and decomposition at the time, to include positive microbial associations. She currently is a professor at PBRC’s Kewalo Marine Laboratory and director of the Pacific Biosciences Research Program at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa.
Natalie Ann Wolchover is a science journalist. She is a senior writer and editor for Quanta Magazine, and has been involved with Quanta's development since its inception in 2013. In 2022 she won a Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting.
