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2024 – 2025 Annual Report

Cultivating the Conditions for Health

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How Can Powerful Storytelling Help Us Connect the Dots?

Today, science and health are under significant threat. Polarization is up. Trust is down. News outlets are shrinking. Mis- and disinformation are rampant in a changing media landscape where readers increasingly find their news from non-traditional sources. It’s more important than ever to provide accessible, reliable, science-based information that can cut through the noise to reach policymakers, scientists, business leaders, and communities. 

Our Media Fellowship program helps to defy reductionist approaches that shy away from tackling the complex challenges we face today. We are committed to supporting outstanding reporting that reflects a broad vision of health.

In 2024-25, we welcomed new Media Fellows reporting on an expansive breadth of topics:

Juhie Bhatia will explore how we can rethink the built environment— from multi-unit and intergenerational housing to public spaces—to foster social connection and improve mental health.

Rowan Jacobsen is investigating the impact of visible and invisible light on the human body.

Tasmiha Khan is examining the biological, psychological, and social transformations that caregivers— including mothers, fathers, and grandparents—undergo while raising children and advance cultural understanding of caregiving as a profound developmental journey.

NPR’s Climate Desk is analyzing the human toll of climate change in the United States and report on other downstream health impacts.

Reasons to Be Cheerful is pursuing a year-long multimedia-augmented exploration of the health impacts of environmental noise.

Maria Parazo Rose is reporting on Indigenous land dispossession and the impacts of climate change.

Simran Sethi is covering the mental health impacts of United States immigration policies in Asian-American populations.

Rochelle Sharpe is investigating whether positive health interventions can offer solutions to seemingly intractable health problems.

I appreciate the way Nova approaches health questions comprehensively, looking at the many factors that contribute to different health outcomes: social, cultural, political. All those factors blend together to influence people’s individual health.

Alejandra Borunda, NPR reporter and 2025-26 Media Fellow

Meeting the Moment: Sparking Impact

Nova Scholar George “Bud” Brainard, PhD, is a pioneering neuroscientist whose research has influenced the lighting on the International Space Station. He and Media Fellow Rowan Jacobsen collaborated in support of Rowan’s reporting on light’s impact on the body, resulting in a Scientific American cover story and a forthcoming book.

Media Fellow Kate Morgan published several critical stories illuminating the interconnected impacts of economic, policy, and medical systems. Her work on the plight of Appalachian coal miners suffering from black lung was featured on the front-page of the New York Times.

See all Media Fellow publications
Coming in 2026

Solve For…, a new podcast exploring how small solutions can lead to big, meaningful change. Hosted by Nova Media Fellow Kate Morgan, the series will feature innovative ideas and out-of-the-box thinking around health and flourishing.

Nova Media Fellows illuminate stories that may go overlooked. Their reporting has been published in top outlets worldwide, including:

Nova Media Advisory Council
  • Virginia Hubbell, Former Executive Director, Mental Insight Foundation (pictured on left)
  • Jackie Judd, Former Vice President and Executive Producer of Multimedia, Kaiser Family Foundation
  • Jayne O’Donnell, Founder & CEO, Youthcast Media Group
  • Meaghan Parker, Council for the Advancement of Science Writing
  • John Schidlovsky, Founding Director, International Reporting Project
  • Rich Stone, Senior International Correspondent, Science Magazine (pictured on right)

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.