Wudan Yan (@wudanyan) received an honorable mention in NSWA’s 2021 Best of the Northwest Science Writing Awards (journalism award) for her April 2021 story in The Atlantic about how pandemic travel restrictions have affected researchers who typically conduct fieldwork abroad. She focuses on an orangutan research station in Borneo and its model of partnership with local researchers that has enabled its studies to continue during the pandemic — and which offers both a more sustainable and a more ethical alternative to the still too-common practice of “parachute science.”
Read about the other three 2021 Best of the Northwest Science Writing Award winners and runners-up, all previously featured in ScienceWire, about COVID-19’s impact on cancer patients (Diane Mapes, winner, institutional writing award), right-wing mobilization against public health experts (Jane C. Hu, winner, journalism award) and Oregon wildfires and climate change (Nancy Steinberg and Abby Phillips Metzger, runners up, institutional writing award).
Photo by Charlsmile via Wikimedia Commons