About The Transmitter

The Transmitter

The Transmitter is an online publication devoted to neuroscience research news and commentary, written primarily for professionals who work in the field. Launched on November 13, 2023, it is funded by the Simons Foundation in New York while maintaining editorial independence from it. The publication was created by the editorial team behind Spectrum, the respected autism research magazine, with the aim of giving the whole of neuroscience the kind of dedicated, journalist-led coverage that Spectrum had given autism science for fifteen years.

Based in New York City, at the Simons Foundation offices on Fifth Avenue according to its own listings, The Transmitter combines breaking research news, longer features, expert opinion and practical resources for scientists at every career stage. Its editor-in-chief is Ivan Oransky, a physician and veteran science editor who took over the predecessor publication in 2020 and led it through the transition to the broader title.

Origins in Spectrum and the Simons Foundation

The Transmitter's roots reach back to 2008, when the Simons Foundation Autism Research Initiative, known as SFARI, added a News and Opinion section to its website. That section grew into a destination for autism researchers who wanted reporting that was independent of any single laboratory or journal. In 2015 it relaunched as Spectrum, an editorially independent online magazine in its own right, dedicated to new findings in autism spectrum disorder research and funded by the Simons Foundation.

Under its founding editor-in-chief, Apoorva Mandavilli, Spectrum built a reputation for authoritative, clearly written coverage that specialists and non-specialists could both use. Mandavilli had previously been senior news editor at Nature Medicine, and her reporting for Spectrum was widely recognised. Her article known as The Lost Girls won first place in its category in the 2015 Association of Health Care Journalism Awards for Excellence and was included in the 2016 edition of the Best American Science and Nature Writing anthology. Another Spectrum article, on electroconvulsive therapy, also won first place in its category in the following year's awards.

The 2023 Launch

By the early 2020s the Spectrum team had concluded that autism was only one part of a much larger field that lacked an equivalent news source. The Transmitter was founded to expand the publication's coverage across neuroscience, while autism reporting continued inside a dedicated Spectrum vertical on the new site. The launch was announced on November 13, 2023, at a satellite event hosted by the Simons Foundation during the Society for Neuroscience annual meeting in Washington, D.C., putting the new title directly in front of the research community it was built to serve.

The name and visual identity were designed around the idea of signals passing between people. In his welcome article, editor-in-chief Ivan Oransky explained that the repeated half-circles in the logo reflect a neural pulse that expands outward, like ripples, when an idea is shared and meets others. He presented the new title as a natural evolution of Spectrum rather than a replacement for it, with the older brand remaining a key part of the publication.

Editorial Mission and Audience

The Transmitter describes itself as an essential resource for the neuroscience community, dedicated to helping scientists at all career stages stay current and build connections. Its stated mission is to deliver useful information, insights and tools that build bridges across a fragmented discipline and advance research. That bridge-building purpose distinguishes it from a general science magazine: its primary reader is a working neuroscientist, not a lay browser, although its writing is intended to be accessible beyond a single subfield.

The publication says its coverage is written by both science journalists and scientists, and that it curates compelling news and insights in one central place. News and features provide deeper analysis of developments in the field, while essays and opinion pieces from experts offer perspectives on emerging topics. The site has repeatedly stressed a commitment to accurate and objective coverage of science and of the people who shape it, a commitment it says has not wavered through its evolution from Spectrum.

Leadership

Ivan Oransky has been editor-in-chief since 2020, succeeding Apoorva Mandavilli, who led Spectrum from 2015 to 2020. Oransky earned his medical degree at New York University and his bachelor's degree at Harvard, where he was executive editor of The Harvard Crimson. Before joining the Simons Foundation publications he held senior editorial roles at Medscape, MedPage Today, Reuters Health, Scientific American and The Scientist, and from 2017 to 2021 he served as president of the Association of Health Care Journalists.

Oransky is also co-founder of Retraction Watch, the site that reports on scientific retractions and research integrity, and he is a Distinguished Journalist in Residence at New York University's Carter Journalism Institute, where he teaches medical journalism. In 2015 he received the John P. McGovern Award for excellence in biomedical communication from the American Medical Writers Association. That background in scientific integrity shapes The Transmitter's positioning as a newsroom attentive not only to discoveries but also to how reliably the field produces them.

Newsroom and Contributing Editors

Day-to-day operations are overseen by executive editor Kristin Ozelli, who joined the Simons Foundation in 2017 as features editor of Spectrum and previously was editorial director, online, and a senior editor at Scientific American and Scientific American Mind. The masthead has also listed Nicholette Zeliadt as managing editor, Emily Singer as opinion and community editor and Brady Huggett as enterprise editor, reflecting a structure that separates daily news, long-form enterprise work and community-facing opinion.

A distinctive feature of the publication is its core group of contributing editors drawn from leading research institutions, who help shape content and contribute editorially. They have included Adrienne Fairhall of the University of Washington, André Fenton of New York University, Daniel Geschwind of the University of California, Los Angeles, Sheena Josselyn of the Hospital for Sick Children, Russell Poldrack of Stanford University, Nicole Rust of the University of Pennsylvania, Joshua Sanes of Harvard University and Anthony Zador of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. An advisory board has likewise mixed journalism figures, such as Knight Science Journalism Program director Deborah Blum and Scientific American editor Laura Helmuth, with scientists and communications specialists.

What It Publishes

The Transmitter offers a steady stream of up-to-date news and analysis of neuroscience, including reports on new studies, features that place findings in context, and profiles of the researchers behind them. Its Spectrum vertical continues to publish news and perspectives on autism research as an anchor of the site, preserving the archive, audience and expertise built since 2008 while placing autism work in conversation with the wider brain sciences.

Beyond articles, the publication provides practical tools for its professional audience, including trackers for upcoming courses and events and resources geared specifically toward early-career researchers. It has also produced large reporting projects, such as an exploration of the state of neuroscience in Latin America based on interviews with dozens of researchers in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico and Uruguay, examining how high-quality research is conducted in the face of numerous obstacles, published in both English and Spanish.

Books and Other Projects

The Transmitter has extended its journalism into book form. Its site presents a collection titled Thinking About Neuroscience, described as its first book, gathering scientist-written essays that explore the culture, craft and practice of the field, its major questions and new ideas, and its evolution over time. The collection includes entries from its series on open neuroscience and data sharing, columns about teaching neuroscience and about writing about it using artificial intelligence, and surveys of scientists about the brain's functional organisation and about what, if anything, distinguishes mood from memory.

An earlier volume in the same series, Chronicle of a Field Retold, was produced as Spectrum's fifth annual book and approached autism science through the lives of the people who research the condition. It opened with a retelling of the field's early history, profiling scientists whose contributions predated or enabled those of Leo Kanner and Hans Asperger, and continued with a tour of contemporary figures, an illustration mapping decades of apprenticeship among autism researchers, and a list of forty up-and-coming scientists under forty.

Place Among Simons Foundation Publications

The Transmitter is one of two editorially independent publications funded by the Simons Foundation that are often discussed together. The other is Quanta Magazine, which reports on mathematics, theoretical physics, theoretical computer science and the basic life sciences. The foundation, a major private funder of basic science, also supports research institutes and centres at universities including Stony Brook, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, the University of California, Berkeley, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

This model, sometimes described as philanthropically funded journalism, gives The Transmitter a stable funder while it states that editorial decisions remain its own. The endorsement the publication quoted at launch from Harvard neurobiologist Joshua Sanes captured the wager behind it: Spectrum's newsletter had become, in his assessment, the most valuable and up-to-date source on autism research, but no equivalent existed for the rest of neuroscience, and The Transmitter was built to fill that gap.

Design, Art and Community

From its launch, The Transmitter emphasised presentation as part of its usefulness. Its welcome article pointed to a clean and dynamic website design, with best practices for accessibility front and centre, and promised to continue Spectrum's practice of commissioning original, diverse and thought-provoking art for its stories. In a field where journal figures are the usual visual language, that commissioning tradition gave the predecessor magazine a recognisable identity that the new title set out to carry forward.

Community building is written into the publication's purpose as explicitly as news gathering. Its launch announcement framed the site as a digital community for communication and collaboration that could help advance scientific research, aimed at researchers across disciplines and career stages. Newsletters, event and course trackers, opinion essays by working scientists and resources for early-career researchers all serve that connective role, positioning The Transmitter not simply as a place to read about neuroscience but as infrastructure for the people who do it.