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People

Meet our 2022 Trailblazers contributors

The creative minds behind this year’s issue

April 8, 2022 | A version of this story appeared in Volume 100, Issue 12

 

A headshot of Katherine Bourzac
Credit: Courtesy of Katherine Bourzac
Katherine Bourzac

Katherine Bourzac

Katherine Bourzac is a senior correspondent at C&EN and is based in San Francisco. Bourzac coleads the Trailblazers project, writes about the environment and materials science, and edits news. Before joining C&EN, she wrote for MIT Technology Review, Nature, and IEEE Spectrum, among other outlets.


A photo of Tiph Browne
Credit: Michael and Carina Photography
Tiph Browne

Tiph Browne

Tiph Browne is a Brooklyn, New York–born freelance photojournalist based in the DC, Maryland, and Virginia area whose portrait and event work focuses on celebrating Black Queer and Trans joy. They are a graduate of Corcoran College of Art and Design at George Washington University and a member of Authority Collective.


A headshot of Payal Dhar
Credit: Shweta Vachani
Payal Dhar

Payal Dhar

Payal Dhar is a freelance journalist writing on the intersection of science, technology, and society. Her work has been published in Wired, the Washington Post, the Guardian, Discover, Astronomy, Slate, and others. She lives in Bangalore, India.


A headshot of Alex Kapitan
Credit: Courtesy of Alex Kapitan
Alex Kapitan

Alex Kapitan

Alex Kapitan is a trainer, speaker, consultant, editor, and activist who left the world of nonfiction book publishing to start Radical Copyeditor (radicalcopyeditor.com), an antioppressive language project that helps writers, editors, activists, academics, museum professionals, media workers, helping professionals, and many others align their words with their values.


A photo of Vanessa Leroy
Credit: Courtesy of Vanessa Leroy
Vanessa Leroy

Vanessa Leroy

Vanessa Leroy is a freelance photographer based in Boston who holds a BFA in photography from Massachusetts College of Art and Design. She sees photography as a tool for social justice, and with it, she hopes to create worlds that people feel as though they can enter and draw from, as well as provide a look into an experience that they may not personally recognize. Her work has been featured in the New York Times, the Washington Post, NPR, Stat News, and Bloomberg and exhibited at Gallery Kayafas in Boston.


A headshot of Bryn Nelson
Credit: Courtesy of Bryn Nelson
Bryn Nelson

Bryn Nelson

Bryn Nelson is an award-winning science writer and former microbiologist based in Seattle. He has accumulated more than 2 decades of science journalism experience, including 7 years at Newsday in New York. Since then, he has written for dozens of other outlets, including the New York Times, NBCNews.com, the Daily Beast, Nature, and Science News for Students.


A photo of Pedro Oliveira
Credit: Courtesy of Pedro Oliveira [Pedrontheworld]
Pedro Oliveira

Pedro Oliveira

Pedro Oliveira is a Brazil-born American editorial, documentary, and advertising still and motion director based in Portland, Oregon; Orange County, California; and Dallas. His humble upbringing by a widowed mother in the countryside of Brazil, the Latino spices of the Brazilian lands, and the sense of still being a kid trapped in this adult’s world are what make Oliveira’s work so fresh and real. Living in Portland for most of his adult life, Oliveira has grown to become a kombucha and coffee snob! You can lure “de Oliveira” to work for you with a bowl of peanut M&Ms.


A photo of Tara Pixley
Credit: Alicia Minette
Tara Pixley

Tara Pixley

Tara Pixley is a queer, Jamaican American photographer, curator, and journalism educator based in Los Angeles. She was a 2021 International Women’s Media Foundation Next Gen Safety Trainer fellow, a 2020 awardee of the inaugural World Press Photo Foundation’s Solutions Visual Journalism Initiative and a 2016 visiting Knight Fellow at Harvard University’s Nieman Foundation for Journalism. Her writing and photography have appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, NPR, Newsweek, ProPublica, HuffPost, Nieman Reports, ESPN Magazine, Canon Europe Pro, and the Black Scholar, among many others. She is on the board of stock photo co-op Stocksy United, serves as secretary of the National Press Photographers Association Board, and is a cofounder of Authority Collective—an organization dedicated to establishing equity in visual media.


A photo of Tyler Santora
Credit: Courtesy of Tyler Santora
Tyler Santora

Tyler Santora

Tyler Santora is the health and science editor at Fatherly and a freelance science journalist based out of Colorado. They have written for publications such as Scientific American, Nature Medicine, Popular Science, and more.


A photo of Helen Santoro
Credit: Courtesy of Helen Santoro
Helen Santoro

Helen Santoro

Helen Santoro is a science journalist based in Gunnison, Colorado. Her work focuses on health, medicine, and LGBTQ+ communities—particularly health-care discrimination faced by the transgender community—and has appeared in publications including Wired, Slate, Kaiser Health News, and Scientific American.


A photo of Neil Savage
Credit: Courtesy of Neil Savage
Neil Savage

Neil Savage

Neil Savage is a freelance science and technology writer near Boston. He is a former newspaper journalist and has written for publications that include Nature, Scientific American, and IEEE Spectrum. He is a longtime member of NLGJA: The Association of LGBTQ Journalists.


A photo of Lidia Sharapova
Credit: Front Room Studios
Lidia Sharapova

Lidia Sharapova

Lidia Sharapova is an editorial and documentary photographer based in Milwaukee. Sharapova uses documentary photography to explore issues of social identity, gender, minorities, and small communities. She believes in the power of photography to change and empower people.


An image of photographer Henri T
Credit: Courtesy of Henri T
Henri T

Henri T

Henri T is a visual storyteller who works with photography, moving image, and performance. They are interested in documenting, exploring, and celebrating queerness and dismantling the many barriers our constructed social world consists of. At the heart of their practice is the exuberant celebration of life and the endless possibilities of individual identity and expression.


A photo of writer Giuliana Viglione

Credit: Courtesy of Giuliana A. Viglione
Giuliana A. Viglione

Giuliana A. Viglione

Giuliana Viglione is a PhD oceanographer turned science journalist based in Washington, DC. Viglione has a particular interest in climate change, the geosciences, and very cold oceans and has previously written for numerous outlets, including C&EN, Nature, and Gizmodo.


A photo of photographer Watsamon Tri-yasakda
Credit: Courtesy of Watsamon June Tri-yasakda
Watsamon Tri-yasakda

Watsamon Tri-yasakda

Watsamon Tri-yasakda, also known as June, is a Thai queer photographer and visual storyteller. June has been actively documenting issues of human rights for the LGBTQ+ community in Thailand and Southeast Asia for over 7 years. She is a member of Women Photograph.


A photo of editor Salgu Wissmath
Credit: Kaitlin B. Owens
Salgu Wissmath

Salgu Wissmath

Salgu Wissmath is a nonbinary Korean American photographer based in Sacramento, California. Their personal work explores the intersections of mental health, queer identity, and faith from a conceptual documentary approach. Wissmath is currently the communications director for Diversify Photo and is proud to be a member of collectives dedicated to diversifying and decolonizing the photo industry, such as Women Photograph, Authority Collective, and Asian American Journalists Association.


A photo of Liam Woods
Credit: @colorsboii on Instagram
Liam Woods

Liam Woods

Liam Woods is a trans and nonbinary Image Maker based out of Los Angeles. Their work is characterized by the vulnerable, candidly intimate storytelling of Queer people, people of color, and other marginalized communities. In their 5-year experience as a photographer, Woods has partnered with brands such as Apple, Adidas, and Warby Parker. They have also shot for publications such as Vogue Paris, the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Cosmopolitan, and Playgirl magazine. The main mission in their work is to continue to build upon community and provide resources and access for the betterment of BIPOC and queer creatives as a whole.

 


UPDATE
This article was updated on April 20, 2022, to reflect Tyler Santora's name change.

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