Australian science journalist Jackson Ryan is the 13^th “Journalist in Residence” at the Heidelberg Institute for Theoretical Studies (HITS), having joined the institute end of April 2025.
Ryan is an award-winning science journalist. A trained scientist with a PhD in pharmaceutical and medical science, he has an eight-year track record as staff and freelance writer. Between 2019 and 2023 he was global science editor at the US tech publication CNET and held the role of science and tech reporter at the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) until February 2024. Since then, he has worked freelance, with pieces across the realms of science and technology published in The New York Times, The Guardian, The Saturday Paper, The Monthly, and Nature.

His chief focus has been on crafting longform, narrative nonfiction across a broad range of scientific disciplines — from astronomy to climate and Earth sciences, biology, big tech, health, and physics. His longform work about climate change in Antarctica was awarded Australia's prestigious Eureka Prize for Science Journalism in 2022. Moreover, he is the current president of the Science Journalists Association of Australia.

During his stay at HITS, Ryan would like to use his time to develop a package of stories focusing on one key issue: Scientific integrity and trust in scientific expertise. “My plan is to research, develop and write a series of longform articles aimed at the public, academics and science journalists that explores the increasingly fraught relationship with the scientific process”, he says. He is particularly interested in the integrity of big datasets and learning from German scientists how they think about current issues of scientific misconduct.
Jackson Ryan will give a first talk on this topic, titled “Science, Fiction: Uncovering Research Misconduct Without Eroding Trust” at the IWR of Heidelberg University on 22 May 2025.

In addition to this project, he is eager to meet German and other European science journalists to foster international ties between the journalistic communities. "I'd love to build on the work started by a former HITS Journalist in Residence, Carl Smith, in strengthening the global science journalism community," he says. He encourages those interested in building these ties to get in touch with him.

The HITS Journalist in Residence Program

To date, thirteen journalists from Canada, the U.S., Australia, India, Spain and Germany have been awarded the HITS fellowship — which started in 2012 with the award-winning German science journalist Volker Stollorz, now chief editor of the German Science Media Center in Cologne (https://www.sciencemediacenter.de/en/), an organization run by journalists that provides journalists with what they need.
HITS is a private, non-profit basic research institute. It was founded by the Klaus Tschira Foundation in 2010. At HITS, currently around 130 scientists from more than 30 countries work in 12 research groups in areas where large amounts of data are produced and processed – from Molecular Biology to Astrophysics. One of the institute’s aims is to make the public more aware of the importance of computer-based, data-driven science, especially in natural sciences.