UC Berkeley Journalism Professor Elena Conis. Photo by Marlena Telvick.
The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation has selected UC Berkeley Journalism Professor Elena Conis (’04) and three other distinguished UC Berkeley scholars from among nearly 5,000 applicants for the 2026 Guggenheim Fellowship. The scholars will be part of the 101st Guggenheim class, which includes 223 people across 55 disciplines.
UC Berkeley Journalism now boasts five Guggenheim recipients on its relatively small faculty: Reva and David Logan Photojournalism Professor Ken Light, Professor Mark Danner, Professor Emeritus Michael Pollan, Associate Professor and Documentary Program Director Jennifer Redfearn and now Conis.
“It was such a happy, welcome surprise,” said Conis about the award. “The opportunity it affords me and all of the recipients to contribute something of significance to humanity is rare and deeply humbling.”
UC Berkeley Journalism Dean Michael D. Bolden called the Guggenheim Fellowship a celebration of Conis’s accomplishments and an investment in her future scholarship.
“She has compiled an exemplary record of teaching, research and service to science journalism, the historical record, UC Berkeley Journalism and our campus,” Bolden said.
Conis served as UC Berkeley Journalism’s acting and then interim dean during the 2024/2025 academic year. She leads the Journalism School’s narrative writing track.
Other Guggenheim recipients at UC Berkeley this year include Rasmus Nielsen, a professor of integrative biology and of statistics, whose laboratory works in the realm of genetics; Hannah Zeavin, an associate professor of history who will use the fellowship to finish her book, All Freud’s Children; and Michael Yartsev, a professor of neuroscience and bioengineering and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator.
Fellows receive a monetary stipend as part of the prestigious award to pursue independent work at the highest level under “the freest possible conditions.”
Conis, who is also a historian and public health expert, plans to use the fellowship to complete a book about the history of measles, the first of its kind and a topic on many minds these days.
“I have been thinking of the social, political and cultural reasons why measles is so hard to keep at bay via vaccination,” Conis said. “We know vaccination works but also that it’s hard to completely wipe out because it requires such a high vaccination rate.”
She explained that measles can be “different diseases in different places and times,” ranging from mild to serious, posing unique challenges for public health. The disease, she said, has been treated as a public health problem to be addressed with childhood vaccinations, but the nation’s approach may need to be reexamined.
“There are some things about the history of measles vaccinations that are troubling and hard to face today yet they are part of the legacy that measles vaccinations carry to the present,” Conis said.
Conis noted that her last two books, like the forthcoming book on measles, are about all of the forces at play in determining how and why we accept some public health interventions, such as vaccinations, and not others. She asks, “What parts of the story are we missing when we focus on the dominant narrative?”
Her previous books include “Vaccine Nation: America’s Changing Relationship with Immunization,” which won the Arthur Viseltear Award in 2015; “How to Sell a Poison: The Rise, Fall, and Toxic Return of DDT,” which won the William H. Welch Medal 2024 and was a National Association of Science Writers Science and Society Book Award finalist in 2023; and, with Aimee Medeiros and Sandra Eder, “Pink & Blue: Gender, Culture, and the Health of Children.”
Conis holds a PhD in the history of medicine from UCSF, master’s degrees in journalism and public health from UC Berkeley, and a bachelor’s degree in biology from Columbia University.
