Class of 2024-25 Scripps Fellows

Steven Bedard is the co-founder and editor of bioGraphic magazine, an editorially independent publication about nature, conservation, and solutions to the biodiversity crisis. He has spent the past 25 years writing and producing science stories and content on topics ranging from astrophysics and archaeology to genetics, evolution, and public health. But as a former field biologist who once studied bird populations in the Intermountain West, he is most at ease with and inspired by issues and solutions that affect ecosystems and biodiversity.

Since starting bioGraphic in 2016, Steven and his colleagues have been intent on covering stories about environmental issues and solutions from around the world. Yet, no matter how in-depth those articles may have been, they regularly revealed a disconnect. Too often stories in all forms of media focus on global-scale phenomena like climate change or urbanization, but don’t explore how individual animals are responding or might respond to these larger, systems-scale disturbances—how they perceive the world, how they behave, where and how they are moving in this increasingly altered world.

During his fellowship year, Steven will explore the challenging divide between systems-scale science and organismal biology, and look for ways to bridge this gap so that we all might better understand the connection between the organisms we see in our own worlds and the much larger changes affecting our planet. He hopes that this understanding will help in our efforts to manage ecosystems and wildlife populations as they are today, and to anticipate the changes that are yet to come

Taylor Dolven is a reporter at The Boston Globe where she focuses on transportation and its intersection with climate change and economic inequality. Previously, her work at The Miami Herald exposed how cruise companies kept workers trapped at sea without pay during the COVID-19 pandemic and spurred long-awaited investment in pollution reduction technology at the world’s largest cruise port.

As a Ted Scripps fellow, Taylor will research how U.S. car dependence is impacting lithium-rich communities in South America as the transportation sector electrifies.

Catherine (Cat) Jaffee is joining the Ted Scripps Fellowship for Environmental Journalism to develop an audio series exploring how ecosystems and human bodies repair themselves and how overlapping biomedical and bioengineered solutions apply to both. 

Cat is an audio producer and the founder of House of Pod, where she has shepherded over 50 podcast series into existence and produced over 1,000 podcast episodes for productions like Radiolab, Outside, National Geographic Society, PRX, PBS, Gimlet, SAPIENS Magazine, and the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. While undergoing cancer treatment in 2020, she wrote and directed Guardians of the River, a podcast about one of Africa’s most wild water systems and the people who protect it. This show won best narrative podcast of 2021 at the Tribeca Film Festival and the Jackson Wild Film Festival. In 2024, she returns to Tribeca with her latest selected series Back to the Water, which she wrote and produced for the team behind My Octopus Teacher.

Since 2017 Cat has designed, led, and taught at podcast incubators, fellowship programs, semester-long courses, and community workshops for hundreds of students from across the globe for institutions such as the Templeton Foundation, Tribal Media, SAPIENS magazine, Arts & Society Redline Program, the Denver School of the Arts, and many more. Before working in audio journalism, Cat was an Environmental Digital Organizer for Fossil Free and 350.org, as well as a Communication Director for Unreasonable and Re:Vision. She also organized honey-tasting trekking cooperatives in Eastern Turkey and the South Caucasus, winning recognition as a model Black Sea Development project in 2013. Cat is a two-time National Geographic grantee, a Fulbright scholar, a Luce scholar, and a proud ultra-bikepacking dabbler. She lives with her two dogs in Durango, Colorado.

Neeta Satam is an Indian photojournalist, educator, and National Geographic Explorer based in St. Louis and Mumbai. She transitioned to a career in journalism following an eight-year stint as an environmental scientist in the United States. Through long-form photographic narratives, she documents the multifaceted impacts of complex environmental problems on individuals, communities, and the natural world. She is an Associate Fellow at the International League of Conservation Photographers and serves on its Advisory Board. She has also served on the advisory board of Ocean Visuals, an Initiative of Climate Visuals. She earned a master's degree in journalism from the University of Missouri's School of Journalism.

Ms. Satam has delivered talks on environmental justice and climate change to national and international audiences. A passionate advocate of photojournalism ethics, she has spoken and written about the topic. She has served as a jury member of the 81st Picture of the Year International. She has covered assignments for The New York Times, Nature Magazine, Popular Mechanics Magazine, Audubon Magazine, The Guardian, The Washington Post, Le Monde, Der Spiegel, NPR, and numerous other publications. She is a Pulitzer Center, The International Women's Media Foundation, and the National Geographic Society grantee.

As a Ted Scripps fellow, she will expand her ongoing long-term project that documents the impacts of climate change on a self-sustenance community in the Indian Himalayas, with an emphasis on gender inequity.

Leah Varjacques is a visual journalist and documentary producer. She began her career making short documentaries about environmental justice and immigration. Since then, she's produced, shot and edited several dozens of short and longform digital and television documentaries for The New York Times, TheAtlantic, and VICE News, where she won an Emmy in 2021. Most recently, Leah has been co-producing feature documentaries for the award-winning FX/Hulu series "The New York Times Presents." Her reporting has brought her all over the world; she's filed from five continents and speaks four languages.

For the Scripps Fellowship year, she plans to study climate adaptation and human geography in order to advance her work on "The Sound Guardians" (working title), a short documentary about the impacts of Indonesia's future capital city on East Borneo's indigenous people.