Do you want to get a jumpstart on making a science podcast, or learn the skills to take your podcast to the next level? Cynthia Graber, co-host/co-founder of the popular, award-winning podcast Gastropod and audio instructor at the MIT Graduate Program in Science Writing, will provide detailed, hands-on instruction in the recording, scripting, and editing necessary to make your podcast sing.

About the Instructor

Cynthia Graber is co-host/co-founder of the internationally popular and acclaimed podcast Gastropod, about the science and history of food. She's also an award-winning print reporter and radio producer whose work has been featured in magazines and radio shows including Wired, Fast Company, The New Yorker, Studio 360, The World, and many others. She launched Gastropod with Nicola Twilley in 2014; the show covers everything from calories to CRISPR and pawpaws to pudding. They're regularly featured in "best of" lists and critic's picks, as well as recognized with awards. The Los Angeles Review of Books called Gastropod "one of the most intelligent food podcasts around," and WNYC compared the show to "a great cocktail — substantial, nuanced, and not over too fast." Cynthia spent 2012-2013 as a Knight Science Journalism Fellow at MIT and is an instructor in the MIT Graduate Program in Science Writing, and she was recently a Fulbright Visiting Scholar at Javeriana University in Bogotá, Colombia.

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Authors can transform mountains of information into an engaging book by employing the craft of storytelling. In this masterclass, Dr. Ainissa Ramirez, the award-winning author of The Alchemy of Us, will share lessons including how to hook a reader, ways to develop a theme, how to nurture one's voice, and ways to build a structure to create your own book. She also will provide tips on ways to incorporate the human element into a book project by employing a range of sources — from interviews to archival materials. Participants can expect in-class activities to punch-up their prose.

About the Instructor

Ainissa Ramirez, PhD. is an award-winning scientist and science communicator. A graduate of Brown University, she earned her doctorate in materials science and engineering from Stanford. Ramirez began her career as a scientist at Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey and later worked as an associate professor of mechanical engineering at Yale.

Ramirez is passionate about getting the general public excited about science. She has appeared as a science expert on CBS, CNN, NPR, ESPN, The History Channel, and PBS. She has also written for Time, Forbes, The Atlantic, Science, Nature, and Scientific American. Her most recent book, The Alchemy of Us (MIT Press, 2020) was a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize, and was selected as a top science book by both Smithsonian Magazine and Science Friday. Her expertise in communicating science to the public has also been lauded by the American Institute of Physics and the American Physical Society, for which she was elected a Fellow.

Currently, Ramirez is writing a series of nonfiction children's science books for MIT Kids Press/Candlewick and Charlesbridge. You can find out more about her at www.ainissaramirez.com.

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In this storytelling masterclass, two best-selling non-fiction authors from MIT, Seth Mnookin, director of the Graduate Program in Science Writing at MIT, and Deborah Blum, director of the Knight Science Journalism program, offer instruction in the craft and business of writing and selling a popular book. Topics will include finding the right agent, proposal drafting basics, techniques for researching and organizing your book, elements of style and story structure, along with tips on promotion and marketing, based on lessons both authors have learned from their own experiences and from their knowledge of the trade book industry.

About the Instructors

Deborah Blum, a Pulitzer prize-winning science journalist is director of the Knight Science Journalism Program at MIT and publisher of the award-winning magazine, Undark. She is the author of six books, including The Poison Squad, a New York Times Notable Book, and the Poisoner’s Handbook, a New York Times best seller, both of which were developed as PBS documentaries. She is also co-editor of A Tactical Guide to Science Journalism, and a former guest editor of Best American Science and Nature Writing. She is currently under contract with Penguin Press for a book about female poisoners. She has written for publications including The New York Times, Wired, Scientific American, Time, Science as well as literary journals such as Tin House. She is a AAAS fellow and a lifetime associate of the National Academy of Sciences, in recognition of her work in science communication.

Seth Mnookin is a longtime journalist and science writer and was a 2019-2020 Guggenheim Fellow. His most recent book, The Panic Virus: The True Story Behind the Vaccine-Autism Controversy, won the National Association of Science Writers “Science in Society” Award and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. He is also the author of the New York Times bestseller Feeding the Monster , about the Boston Red Sox, and Hard News, a Washington Post Best Book of the Year. He began his career as a music critic and has covered everything from rare diseases and the Iraq War to Stephen Colbert and Batman. Mnookin is also the director of MIT’s Graduate Program in Science Writing and the chair of the Institute's Comparative Media Studies/Writing department.

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In this masterclass we will examine why trust is declining, how people decide what to believe, and strategies to rebuild the critical connection between society and science. We'll share ideas for how to counteract this erosion and safeguard our democracy. Through interactive discussions and review of a variety of use cases, you'll discover how to create meaningful spaces for curiosity, conversation, and trust. Deb Roy is a professor of Media Arts and Science at MIT where he directs the MIT Center for Constructive Communication (CCC). As the Head of Translational Research at the MIT Center for Constructive Communication, Dimitra Dimitrakopoulou leads sociotechnical research at the intersection of dialogue, technology, and design.

About the Instructors

Deb Roy is professor of Media Arts and Sciences at MIT where he directs the MIT Center for Constructive Communication (CCC). He leads research in designing human-AI systems that foster dialogue, listening, and deliberation in ways that build civic muscle. Roy is also co-founder and unpaid CEO of Cortico, a closely affiliated nonprofit collaborator of CCC that develops, operates and supports a conversation platform designed to surface underheard voices and perspectives and create scalable dialogue networks.

Roy serves on the board of the Knight First Amendment Institute, the FRONTLINE advisory council, and is a faculty associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University.

Previously, Roy was a visiting professor at Harvard Law School (2021-22), and served as executive director of the MIT Media Lab (2019-2021), where CCC is based. He has served on the Knight Commission on Trust, Media, and Democracy and the Aspen Institute’s Commission on Information Disorder.

While on leave from MIT, Roy co-founded and was CEO of Bluefin Labs, a media analytics company that analyzed the interactions between television and social media at scale. Bluefin was acquired by Twitter in 2013, Twitter’s largest acquisition to date. From 2013-2017 Roy served as Twitter’s chief media scientist.

Roy is the author of over 185 academic papers including a study of the spread of false news that was the cover story of Science magazine in 2018 and cited as one of the most influential academic publications of the year. His 2023 essay in The Atlantic describes his journey from studying social media to creating dialogue networks, and his 2024 Atlantic essay explores ways to tackle truth decay. Roy’s widely viewed TED talk Birth of a Word presents his pioneering research on his son’s language development that led to new ideas in media analytics.

A native of Canada, Deb was born and raised in Winnipeg and spent large parts of his childhood in Calcutta. He received his Bachelor of Applied Science from the University of Waterloo and PhD in Media Arts and Sciences from MIT.

As the Head of Translational Research at the MIT Center for Constructive Communication, Dimitra Dimitrakopoulou leads sociotechnical research at the intersection of dialogue, technology, and design. By bringing deep expertise in participatory methods, qualitative analysis, and design research, she focuses on the design, prototyping, and advancement of social dialogue technologies and oversees the transfer of research methods, tools, and systems to practice and deployment.

Dimitra also holds a tenured Assistant Professor’s position (currently on leave) at the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (Greece). Funded by the European Commission under Horizon 2020 – the European Union’s flagship initiative for Research & Innovation – Dimitra was a Marie Curie Global Fellow (joint visiting appointment at MIT and the University of Zurich, Switzerland) from 2019 to mid-2022, focusing on studying vaccine misinformation.

Her work has been published in peer-reviewed journals, such as Digital Journalism, International Journal of Qualitative Methods, Harvard Kennedy School Misinformation Review, Media, War & Conflict, South European Society and Politics, and Critical Discourse Studies. She currently serves as an International Liaison for the Journalism Studies Division of the International Communication Association.

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