Acclaimed Science Writers Yangyang Cheng, Priyanka Runwal Join The Xylom’s Advisory Board

I have some good news to share: Dr. Yangyang Cheng and Priyanka Runwal have accepted invitations to join The Xylom’s expanded Advisory Board, effective today. 

Yangyang and Priyanka are scientists-turned-writers who leverage their technical expertise to interrogate complex social issues. Both are this year’s winners of the AAJA Journalism Excellence Awards. They are also first-generation Asian immigrants: Yangyang was born and raised in China, while Priyanka hails from India. 

They are a perfect fit for The Xylom, which, seven years after our founding, is still the only Asian American-run news outlet dedicated to covering science, climate, and the environment.

Yangyang is a Research Scholar in Law and Fellow at Yale Law School’s Paul Tsai China Center, where her work focuses on the development of science and technology in China and US‒China relations. Her essays have appeared in outlets including The New York Times, The Guardian, The Nation, MIT Technology Review, and WIRED. She is an editor at the Made in China Journal and hosts its Gateway to Global China podcast. She is also a co-host, writer, and producer of Crooked Media’s acclaimed narrative podcast series Dissident at the Doorstep. 

Yangyang received her Ph.D. in physics from the University of Chicago and her bachelor’s from the University of Science and Technology of China’s School for the Gifted Young. Before joining Yale, she worked on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) for over a decade, most recently at Cornell University and as an LHC Physics Center Distinguished Researcher at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory.

"I have been a big fan and loyal reader of The Xylom for years,” said Yangyang. “I remember my astonishment when I learned how young its team members are, and continue to be deeply impressed and inspired by their dedication to truth and to stories that matter, which both represent the best of journalistic tradition and give one hope for the future of this embattled yet essential profession.”

Priyanka is an award-winning, multilingual science journalist based in New York City. For C&EN, she covers communities impacted by toxic pollutants and those left behind in the wake of scientific advances. Previously, she covered the COVID-19 pandemic and other health stories as National Geographic's resident reporter. Priyanka's work has also appeared in The New York Times, Scientific American, STAT, and BBC Earth, among other publications. She’s an ecologist by training and a graduate of the UC, Santa Cruz Science Communication Program.

“It's a huge honor to serve on The Xylom's advisory board. I'm looking forward to supporting and helping the newsroom navigate its mission to cover community-centric science and environment stories,” said Priyanka. “It's rare to find an immigrant-run newsroom serving an Asian American audience. I'm excited to lend my experience as a South Asian science journalist based in the US, but more so, learn from The Xylom's editors and reporters shaping critical stories that amplify underrepresented voices.”

Together with our current Advisory Board members, Tyler Jones, Betsy Ladyzhets, and Paola Rosa-Aquino, Yangyang and Priyanka will evaluate whether The Xylom's coverage best serves our audience, provide insights on reporting projects and fundraising, and connect us with peer reporters, newsrooms, and donors.

Yangyang and Priyanka are joining The Xylom at a crucial inflection point: in June, we faced a severe funding shortfall due to attacks on the free press, immigrants, scientific research, and philanthropy by the Trump administration. Chief among these was the arrest of independent journalist Mario Guevara while covering the “No Kings” protests.

Guevara is the only journalist jailed in the United States for doing his job, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists; ICE is openly defying a judge’s release order to release him. I wrote recently in our newsletter about how these attacks have created ripple effects across Atlanta’s news ecosystem.

Under these unprecedented circumstances, we still successfully raised over $12,000 for nearly 200 individuals within a week, which stabilizes The Xylom’s finances until the end of the summer. Yangyang and Priyanka’s addition to our Advisory Board is a vote of confidence in our values, our work, and our future trajectory.

“At a time when stories of science and the environment occupy not only national headlines but the forefront of geopolitics, independent reporting from an Asian-American newsroom like The Xylom brings a much-needed fresh lens and transnational perspective to these critical issues,” added Yangyang. “The future of science and technology should not be dictated from the center, but must be fought for from the margins, and we need teams like The Xylom in this collective endeavor." 

Please join us in welcoming Yangyang and Priyanka!