KSJ@MIT Advanced Fact-Checking Workshop

Brooke Borel is a journalist and author specializing in science and technology. She’s the articles editor at Undark, an independent digital magazine devoted to coverage of science in the public interest, and has written for Popular Science, BuzzFeed News, the Guardian, TheAtlantic.com, Scientific American, Medium’s OneZero, FiveThirtyEight, Slate, and other publications. The Alicia Patterson Foundation, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation have funded her work. She teaches writing workshops at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at New York University and speaks on journalism and fact-checking nationally and internationally. In 2019 her Scientific American article “Clicks, Lies and Videotape” received the American Society for Journalists and Authors award for outstanding science or Technology article, and she was a finalist in the National Academies Communication Awards. Her work has been anthologized in What Future. Her books are Infested: How the Bed Bug Infiltrated Our Bedrooms and Took Over the World and The Chicago Guide to Fact-Checking, both from the University of Chicago Press.

Yvonne Rolzhausen is the Research Chief at The Atlantic and the head of the fact-checking department. She started as an intern at the magazine while attending Tufts University and has been with Atlantic Media for 30 years. Rolzhausen frequently lectures at various universities and overseas on checking and accuracy.

Aiganysh Aidarbekova joined Bellingcat in 2018 as a Central Asian researcher and data trainer shortly after getting her Economics degree in Kyrgyzstan. Bellingcat is a collective of researchers and citizen journalists using open source and social media investigation to probe a variety of subjects from environmental issues to war crimes. Using Instagram, Google Maps, official databases and other open source materials, Aiganysh investigated large-scale corruption in the kyrgyz government custom’s service. In 2020, Aiganysh also became part of Bellingcat’s TechTeam project which specializes in data driven investigations and tool development. Aiganysh has created tools for scraping governmental databases and for researching private jets in Kazakhstan linked to the government officials. Currently she is focusing on civilian harm done in Ukraine, conspiracy theories in the EU, as well as conflict investigations in Central Asia. As a trainer Aiganysh has taught hundreds of journalists and activists around the world from Sydney to Tbilisi to London on the fundamentals of Open Source Investigations and Verification.

Rich Stone is the senior science editor at Tangled Bank Studios, where he oversees science content for documentaries and other nonfiction films. He also manages journalism partnerships with the Associated Press, The Atlantic, Univision, and other media outlets. Prior to joining Tangled Bank, Rich was the international news editor at Science Magazine, where his writing often featured datelines from challenging reporting environments such as Cuba, Iran and North Korea. He remains a contributing correspondent for Science. Rich has also contributed to Discover, Smithsonian and National Geographic magazines, and is the author of the nonfiction book “Mammoth: The Resurrection of an Ice Age Giant.” Stone earned a B.S. in genetics from Cornell University, and a graduate degree in science communication from the University of California, Santa Cruz. In his spare time, he writes science fiction screenplays.

Wudan Yan is an award-winning independent journalist based in the Pacific Northwest. Her enterprise and magazine stories about science and society have appeared in The Atlantic, High Country News, MIT Tech Review, and The New York Times, among others. She hosts the popular freelance business podcast The Writers’ Co-op and also produces and fact-checks limited series narrative podcasts. Headshot photographer, Daniel Berman.