Julia Simon is the Climate Solutions correspondent for NPR News.
She’s a part of NPR’s climate change team and her reporting airs on the radio, npr.org and NPR’s podcasts.
Julia has reported for NPR on the tree math of carbon offsets, how misinformation is derailing renewable energy projects across the U.S., and traveled deep into the Sumatran rainforest in search of climate solutions.
Julia spent much of her career reporting from the Middle East, Africa and Southeast Asia. She was a foreign correspondent in Cairo– before and after the revolution, in Indonesia where she hosted a weekly radio show broadcast across Asia, and in Nigeria where she investigated the country’s oil sector as a Fulbright Scholar. In addition to her radio work, she spent time in print as a staff reporter at Reuters covering the energy economy.
As a guest host for Planet Money she found gold and staked a claim to explain America’s 150-year-old mining law, traveled to a so-called “art graveyard” in Delaware to explain tax avoidance, and along with Planet Money’s Kenny Malone visited an old oil boom town to explain the history of antitrust. The antitrust series was a 2020 finalist for the Gerald Loeb Award in business journalism.
She’s a graduate of the University of Chicago and spent a year as a KSP Fellow studying international energy and climate change at the Sciences Po in Paris.
LANGUAGES SPOKEN: Egyptian Arabic, Spanish, Indonesian, French
FELLOWSHIPS AND GRANTS:
Nassef Sawiris Fellow, 2009, EGYPT
Henry Luce Scholar, 2010 - 2011, INDONESIA
Fulbright Scholar, 2014- 2015, NIGERIA
Pulitzer Center Grantee, 2015, NIGERIA
Kuwait Excellence Scholar, 2015 - 2016, FRANCE
Water Desk Fellow, University of Colorado Boulder, 2022-2023, USA
Media Fellow, Bill Lane Center for the American West, Stanford, 2022-2023, USA
EDUCATION:
University of Chicago, BA with Honors in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations (Arabic and Middle Eastern History)
Sciences Po, Paris (Institut d'études politiques de Paris), KSP Excellence Scholar in Climate Change Studies, International Energy