Pamoja and Pulitzer Fellowships awarded

The Boston University College of Communication (COM), School of Public Health (SPH) and the Center for Global Health & Development announced today the 10 student recipients of the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting fellowships and the Pamoja Together: Student Foreign Aid News Network fellowships. These fellowships are an initiative of the Boston University Program on Crisis Response and Reporting.

The Boston University Program on Crisis Response and Reporting brings journalists and global health specialists together to improve mutual understanding and to promote collaborative global health storytelling. The partnership combines the expertise of the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting in Washington, D.C., with COM, SPH and BU’s Center for Global Health & Development.

More than 50 students applied for the fellowships and represented five colleges within the university: COM, SPH, the College of Arts and Sciences, the School of Social Work and School of Education. The applicants were from 20 different states, plus Washington, D.C. and 10 different countries.

The two recipients of the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting fellowships, Lusha Chen (COM ’13) and Kerstin Egenhofer (SPH ’14), will travel to Washington, D.C. this summer to work at the Pulitzer Center’s headquarters for 2-4 weeks. They will also travel internationally with a Pulitzer Center journalist to research and write a narrative feature article or create a multimedia production.

The Pamoja Together: Student Foreign Aid News Network project, which is funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, will give eight students from Boston University the opportunity to travel to Kenya to work in teams with Kenyan students to create high quality productions, video, photography, audio and text that capture the compelling stories of aid from a local perspective. Those eight students are Jim Dandee (COM ’13), Laura Hanson (SPH ’13), Jeremy Hartman (CAS ’13 COM ’13), Kasha Patel (COM ’13), Elizabeth Daube (SPH ’13), Jessica Wiley (SPH ’14), Miluka Gunaratna (SPH ’14) and Lindsay Hamsik (GRS ’14).

“The Pamoja project is a completely new endeavor for us in that we will be bringing eight of the best students from across the university together and immersing them in global health, foreign aid, and storytelling,” said Jennifer Beard, assistant professor of international health at SPH. “And, most importantly, they will be working in teams with Kenyan students.”

“We are excited about the prospect of pairing BU students with their Kenyan counterparts to produce compelling narratives about the human side of foreign aid,” added COM journalism professor, Elizabeth Mehren.

Students from COM and SPH were eligible for the Pulitzer fellowships, whereas the Pamoja fellowships were open to students university-wide. “Students were chosen from across the university based on their storytelling abilities and familiarity with foreign aid, global health and development and Africa,” said Anne Donohue, associate professor of journalism at COM.

Established in 1947, the Boston University College of Communication (COM) specializes in Film and Television, Journalism, and Mass Communication, Advertising and Public Relations. With more than 2,000 undergraduate and graduate students, COM offers a strong liberal arts core with a heavy focus on preparing students for careers as communication professionals. COM’s faculty is a blend of traditional academicians and widely- experienced professionals.

The Center for Global Health & Development (CGHD) at Boston University is a multidisciplinary research center that engages faculty from across the University to help solve the critical global health and social development challenges of our time. The mission of the center is not only to conduct high-quality applied research, but also to advocate for the use of this research to improve the health of underserved populations around the world. Through its collaborative work with scientists worldwide, the CGHD seeks to strengthen individual and institutional capacity to conduct and utilize research.

Contact:

Kira Jastive
617-358-1240
kjastive@bu.edu