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.

Tim Durham is an agriculturalist and professor of crop science at @FerrumCollege. He has experience in crop biosecurity and his family operates a 30-acre farm on Long Island. He is writing about agriculture, biotechnology and pesticides

@Sam__Enright is the Innovation Policy Lead at @ProgressIreland . He has an M.A. in Economics and Philosophy from the @EdinburghUni, and writes about metascience, Irish history and policy. He has received two Emergent Ventures grants from the @mercatus Center.

@etiennefd is a software engineer and AI evaluations specialist. His work has been published in @WorksInProgMag and @asteriskmgzn. He is interested in the historical, cultural, and evolutionary aspects of technological progress and he is working on creating an interactive historical tech tree.

@PoeticJusticeHA is a startup founder and operator with experience in China’s manufacturing and supply chain systems. She is writing about U.S. industrial renewal and Chinese industrial capabilities. She is fluent in Chinese.

Michael Hill was the Asia Pacific policy advisor at the @energygovuk until recently. He will soon be starting a new policy research role at @BritainRemade, a pro-progress, growth and abundance campaign organization. He is writing about development economics for the U.K.