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Rowan Jacobsen

2024 Nova Media Fellow

Rowan is an author and journalist who writes about science, nature, and the less-explored corners of the world. His writing has appeared in the pages of the New York Times, Washington Post, Boston Globe, Harper’s, Outside, The Atlantic, Scientific American, Smithsonian, Audubon, MIT Technology Review, Mother Jones, Popular Science, and elsewhere, and his work has been anthologized in the Best American Science & Nature Writing. He is the author of Fruitless Fall, The Living Shore, Shadows on the Gulf, and other books, including the James Beard Award-winning A Geography of Oysters. He has been featured on All Things Considered, The Splendid Table, CBS This Morning, Weekend Edition, and Morning Edition; has lectured at Harvard and Yale; and has performed with Pop-Up Magazine. He lives in the Vermont countryside with his wife and a few old apple trees.

Media Fellowship Project

Light Reconsidered: The Impact of Visible and Invisible Light on Human Health

In recent years, a revolution has taken place in our understanding of sunlight’s profound impact on mental and physical well-being. Some of these effects are well-known, such as morning light’s ability to increase alertness and alleviate depression. Others have yet to make it beyond professional circles, but are well established. Lack of sunlight is associated with higher rates of autoimmune diseases such as multiple sclerosis; cardiovascular conditions including heart attacks and stroke; other diseases believed to have an inflammatory component, such as Alzheimer’s disease and atherosclerosis; and metabolic conditions including diabetes and obesity.

Scientists are now unraveling the mechanisms behind these effects. Vitamin D turns out to be just one of dozens of beneficial compounds produced by skin with the help of light, compounds that are essential to the functioning of the immune, endocrine, and nervous systems. The skin is our largest organ, and the one that makes first contact with our environment. It sets the tone for the rest of the body, delivering a signaling cascade that helps us to maintain homeostasis in lockstep with the day and the seasons.

Yet as we’ve moved to an indoor existence lit by the pale glow of screens and artificial lighting, our bodies have been left in a state of “biological darkness,” adrift from natural rhythms. The problem is most acute for people with darker skin, who are much less susceptible to skin cancer but require more light to produce the same level of beneficial compounds. Today, experts are calling for a reconsideration of “one size fits all” recommendations for sun exposure tailored to people with pale skin.

Rowan will devote his Media Fellowship to exploring our changing relationship with light and its impact on both the individual and societal level. He will go from the laboratory, where clinicians are using light to treat everything from depression to multiple sclerosis; to city neighborhoods where lack of access to natural light has become an issue of environmental justice. When it comes to light, we have lost the forest for the trees, but it is still possible to find our way back to a more balanced state.

Media Fellow Publications

Education and Training
  • MFA, creative writing, University of North Carolina
  • BA, English, New College
Selected Honors
  • Knight Science Journalism fellow
  • Alicia Patterson Foundation fellow
  • McGraw Center for Business Journalism fellow
Selected Publications

Healing is facilitated through safety, persistence, and trust.

  • Persistence: “People did not simply progress through this sequence and experience healing. The healing journey was a recursive, back and forth process. They found helpers, used the skills/resources that those helpers provided, found other helpers that provided more resources and used those skills and resources. As this process continued, people experienced a gradual amelioration of their suffering. Although many despaired at times, all demonstrated the quality of persistence—they refused to give up.”
  • Safety & Trust: “To connect to helpers, it was essential for people to feel safe in those relationships and able to trust that the person would be a helper and not a barrier to healing. Persons whose wounds included a violation of trust were especially careful about testing the safety of new relationships.”

Resources support us as we heal. They include reframing, responsibility, and positivity. “Making connections enabled participants to acquire and refine resources and skills that were essential in their healing journey. People also brought their own personal strengths to the journey.”

  • Reframing: “A particularly important skill was the ability to reframe—that is to look at suffering through a different lens.” This does NOT mean minimizing trauma or pain, but rather it often means the opposite: understanding what happened was wrong, unfair, or uncontrollable and that we are not to blame for it.
  • Responsibility: While we don’t have control over what happened to us, we are the only ones who can help ourselves heal. “A third essential resource that people acquired or refined was the ability to take an appropriate amount of responsibility for their healing journeys. They participated actively in the process of healing. Once again, some participants already had developed this skill, and some acquired or refined it from their helpers.”
  • Positivity: “Another resource that people acquired or refined during their healing journey was choose to be positive—that is to have some optimism about their situation.” People have varying predispositions to positivity. In the study, positivity was important in helping people heal. This doesn’t mean a toxic positivity, but rather simply finding some good in life and feeling hopeful about our situations.

“Connection to others was an essential part of all the healing journeys.” Humans are social creatures, and even the most introverted of us need close relationships. Friends and family add meaning and value to life and help support us, in good times and bad. 

When we experience relational trauma, relationships can feel scary, but reestablishing safety and trust in relationships is where the healing happens. (To be clear, we do not mean reestablishing safety and trust with abusers, but rather finding other healing relationships.) 

“When safety and trust had been established, people were able to connect with helpers. The nature of the behaviours of helpers that fostered healing ranged from small acts of kindness to unconditional love.”

  • “Moving from being wounded, through suffering to healing, is possible. It is facilitated by developing safe, trusting relationships and by positive reframing that moves through the weight of responsibility to the ability to respond.”
  • “Relationships with health professionals were among these but were not necessarily any more important to the healing journey than other kinds of helpers, which included family members, friends, spirituality and their God, pets, support groups, administrators, case workers and supervisors.”

Healing probably means different things to different people, but one definition that emerged from the study is: “The re-establishment of a sense of integrity and wholeness.” 

Healing was an emergent property that resulted from each individuals’ complex healing journey, a result of bridged connections between resources and relationships. “…they gradually found relief from suffering and began to exhibit emergent characteristics: a sense of hope, self-acceptance, and a desire to help others—the immediate precursors to healing.”

 In varying degrees, “they were able to transcend their suffering and in some sense to flourish.” 

  • Helping Others: We find meaning in helping others. “Understanding that suffering gives the strength and experience to help others in similar situations.”
  • Hope: We begin to have hope that we will not always feel this bad. A Crohn’s patient said, “I think gradually I realized that I was going to feel better. I did have days when I actually didn’t vomit, when I did feel better. And I think gradually I came to believe that maybe I could have a normal life again.”
  • Self-Acceptance: We see our inherent value and understand that we are not to blame for our suffering. A participant living with HIV said, “I’m really proud of myself. I think that now I still want to live. I don’t want to die, and I really love myself a lot. I have a lot of comfort in myself.”

Suffering is the ongoing pain from wounding. 

There is some debate about whether people always experience suffering on the path to healing.

Wounding happens when we experience physical or emotional harm. It can stem from chronic illness or by physical or psychological trauma for which we do not have the tools to cope, or a combination of those factors. 

“The degree and quality of suffering experienced by each individual is framed by contextual factors that include personal characteristics, timing of their initial or ongoing wounding in the developmental life cycle and prior and current relationships.”

Characteristics: How predisposed someone may be to wounding/how many tools and resources someone may have to deal with trauma/illness.

Lifestages: Developmental timing plays an important role in the impact of trauma — young children often do not have the same resources as older adults.

Relationships: Relationships can provide solace and support for those suffering, while lack of healthy relationships can prolong suffering.