Quanta Magazine Writer and Podcast Host Win Awards for Excellence in Science Communications

Two of this year’s winners of the Eric and Wendy Schmidt Awards for Excellence in Science Communications are being honored for their contributions to Quanta Magazine.

Each year, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, in partnership with Schmidt Futures, hand out 24 awards in eight categories to “honor top science communicators, journalists, and research scientists who have developed creative, original work to communicate issues and advances in science, engineering, and/or medicine for the general public.”

Quanta senior staff writer Jordana Cepelewicz is a winner of the Science Journalist: Early Career prize for her reporting on the odd movements of the simple animal Trichoplax adhaerens and her profiles of Fields Medal winner June Huh and math prodigy Daniel Larsen. Cepelewicz joined Quanta in 2017 as the magazine’s staff writer covering biology. In 2022, she began covering mathematics for the magazine and was promoted to senior writer.

Steven Strogatz, a mathematician and host of Quanta’s “The Joy of Why” podcast, earned “top prize” in the Research Scientist: Mid-Career to Later Career category in part for his coverage of infinite sums and our bodies’ immune systems for Quanta. Strogatz is a longtime contributor to Quanta and previously served on the magazine’s board of advisors.

The Simons Foundation is a philanthropy founded in 1994 by Jim and Marilyn Simons with a mission to advance the frontiers of research in mathematics and the basic sciences. Quanta Magazine is an award-winning editorially independent publication launched by the Simons Foundation to illuminate big ideas in science and math through public service journalism. Quanta’s reporters and editors focus on developments in mathematics, theoretical physics, theoretical computer science and the basic life sciences, emphasizing timely, accurate, in-depth and well-crafted articles for its broad discerning audience.