We’re thrilled to introduce our third cohort of 2025 Blog-Build Intensive Fellows!

This year’s fellows are a group of 31 progress writers selected from a pool of over 400 impressive applicants. In our third year of the program, the quality of applicants has yet again gone up. Over ¼ of applicants merited a first round interview, and we had 51 finalists

They are scientists, urbanists, economists, lawyers, farmers, professors, policy-makers, builders, entrepreneurs and storytellers. They hail from the U.S., Canada, Ireland, the U.K., and Germany; they speak English, French, Mandarin, Farsi, Hindi, Korean, German, and Spanish.

And they’ll be writing about medical history, apprenticeship programs, precision agriculture, American reindustrialization, competition with China, trains and transportation, Irish progress, aging research, biotechnology, the moral imperative of progress and so much more.

We’re thrilled to have once again assembled a an outstanding group of progress writers and thinkers:

@sjgadler is a former @OpenAI safety researcher. He has an M.S. in Machine Learning and Computer Science from @GeorgiaTech. He is writing about AI safety and the post-AGI Future.

Andrew Burleson is the co-founder and board chair of @StrongTowns. For his day job he is a head of engineering. He is writing about housing, urbanism, technology and how to bring dynamism back to our cities.

@ByronCohenMA is a pandemic preparedness policy practitioner with a Ph.D. in public health from @Harvard. He previously served as an advisor to the White House Office of Pandemic Preparedness. He is writing about public health, pandemic preparedness and biotechnology.

@rootsofprogress @StrongTowns Thanks @rootsofprogress, excited to be part of this cohort! Just to clarify, I’m one of four cofounders at Strong Towns: Chuck started it all, then John Reuter, Ian Rasmussen and I joined early on. Cheers!