UNION MEDALS, AWARDS AND PRIZES
Walter Sullivan Award for Excellence in Science Journalism – Features
Past Recipients

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2025 RECIPIENT
Brooke Jarvis
2024 RECIPIENT
Nadia Drake
Nadia Drake has spent her career artfully navigating the intersection of science and communication. By the time she was born, her father, Frank, had become iconic for his scientifically rigorous attempts to communicate with life beyond Earth, suff...
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2023 RECIPIENT
Julia L Rosen
Independent journalist Julia Rosen trained as a geologist, but over the past decade, she has become an accomplished professional storyteller. Julia brings to all of her writing the research rigor of her scientific background, the clear vision of a se...
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2022 RECIPIENT
Gregory Barber
In a remote part of Nevada called Rhyolite Ridge, there is a hill with enough lithium to power batteries for about 400,000 electric cars a year for 25 years. At a moment when mitigating the effects of climate change becomes more urgent by the day,...
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2021 RECIPIENT
Jonathan O'Callaghan
AGU’s Walter Sullivan Award is given annually for work with a prep time of more than one week. This year, however, it’s being awarded for a story that has been eons in the making: the murky origins of chondrules, tiny glassy inclusions in certain met...
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2020 RECIPIENT
Joshua Sokol
2019 RECIPIENT
Sarah Kaplan
Planetary scientists gathered for a 3-day workshop last year to debate one of the most momentous decisions of modern space exploration: Where should NASA send its next Mars rover, a mission that will send back rocks to be examined for signs of life? ...
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2018 RECIPIENT
Douglas Fox
Douglas Fox has spent much of the past 11 years writing about ice: how microscopic dust grains spawn high-altitude ice crystals that lead to rain, how the ice crystals that compose the rings of Saturn led scientists to discover a potential habitat fo...
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