Focus on Climate Change: Alumni Spotlight on Columbia Investigations Postgraduate Fellow Bridget Hickey (M.S. '18)

We are pleased to present a new series about how Columbia Journalism School has been training its students to become leading climate change reporters. With changes in the climate endangering lives, ecologies, and economies at global and local levels, the work of journalists is vital for effectively and accurately explaining the science and implications of climate change to the public. In this alumni spotlight, we profile Bridget Hickey, a 2018 graduate of the Master of Science Program who, after graduation, reported on climate change as a 2018 - 19 Columbia Journalism Investigations Postgraduate Fellow.  

Students in the Master of Science and Master of Arts programs at Columbia Journalism School are offered the exclusive opportunity to apply for full-time Postgraduate Fellowships that give recent graduates the opportunity to dig deep into subjects of urgent public interest and to publish their work in professional news outlets.  If selected as fellows, Columbia Journalism School students will work after graduation in one of several postgraduate fellowship groups to produce complex investigations and reporting projects.

During her Columbia Journalism Investigations fellowship, Bridget Hickey worked with Director Kristen Lombardi and a reporting team on a series of investigative stories about climate change and health, looking into what federal, state, and local governments are doing - and not doing - to prepare for the risks climate change poses to human health. 

Although one of Hickey's most notable recent publications was a New York Times investigation into McKinsey's secretive hedge fund, she has remained engaged in climate change reporting since her studies at Columbia.  As a Master of Science student, Hickey took Professor Marguerite Holloway and Professor Duy Linh Tu's team-taught "Storytelling About the Environment" course, in which classmate Arjun Ram Srivatsa (M.S. '18) and she produced a short documentary about a group of teenagers in the Bronx who developed a mesh wi-fi network that would operate even if a hurricane or other climate-related disaster disabled conventional internet access.  In the video below, Hickey discusses why she has been committed to covering climate, explaining that she has seen first-hand how climate change has affected life in her native Tasmania, Australia.  



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