IRE is excited to announce that the recipients of the 2025 IRE Freelance Fellowship are Jennifer Chowdhury and Molly Cotner! In their respective projects, Jennifer will investigate the U.S. government’s inconsistent approach to granting citizenship to children born through international surrogacy, while Molly will lead a community-centered investigation into the realities of the childcare crisis in Pueblo, Colorado.  

Jennifer Chowdhury is an independent  journalist with over 15 years of experience covering migration, immigration, and the social forces that shape people’s lives across borders. Her reporting, essays, and cultural commentary have appeared in publications such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, Harper’s Bazaar and The Guardian alongside her independent newsroom project, Port of Entry– a narrative journalism platform she founded to center the voices, histories, and lived experiences of immigrant and diaspora communities.

Molly Cotner is a journalist and researcher based in Pueblo, Colorado. She is a reporter with the Pueblo Star Journal, a service – and deliberative-focused nonprofit newsroom serving Pueblo and Southern Colorado, where she covers investigative and accountability reporting on local and regional issues. Her current work includes an in-depth examination of the childcare crisis in the region, exploring how public policy decisions, labor conditions, and barriers to access intersect with Pueblo’s cultural attributes and ways of life. Her reporting pays particular attention to multicultural and intergenerational family networks that often function as informal support systems for working families, masking structural gaps while sustaining communities. Cotner earned a master’s degree in journalism from New York University and also holds a master’s degree in sociology. Alongside her reporting, she teaches at the university level and brings a community-engaged approach to producing rigorous journalism in underreported areas.