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Best Practices: Covering Science in CyberspaceAgenda | Speakers | Fellows | Resources | BlogFellowsAlan Boyle is science editor for MSNBC.com, focusing on space exploration as well as the physical and historical sciences. He touches on those topics in Cosmic Log (est. 2002), MSNBC.com's longest-running Weblog. Alan previously worked as an editor at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, The Cincinnati Post and the (Spokane, Wash.) Spokesman Review. He holds degrees in literature, philosophy and journalism from Loras College and Columbia University. Email: Curtis Brainard covers science and climate issues for the Columbia Journalism Review. His work has also appeared in The New York Times. He holds an M.A. in earth and environmental science and an M.S. in journalism from Columbia University in New York. His thesis, based on a study of fossil corals in Vanuatu, examined variations in the amount of cosmic radiation and radiocarbon in Earth’s atmosphere. Email: David Braun is the director of National Geographic News, the National Geographic Society's online daily news service. Prior to launching the news service in 2001, the South-African-born Braun was an editor in the Society's communications office. Before that he was the Washington correspondent for CMP Media's TechWeb and a financial desk editor for UPI. Braun was with Independent Newspapers in South Africa for 14 years. Positions with that publisher included chief political correspondent for the Johannesburg Star and Washington bureau chief for the group of 13 newspapers. Braun has a B.A. in political science and international politics and a post-graduate degree in marketing management from the University of South Africa. Email: Matthew Crenson became national writer in 1999 for The Associated Press, specializing in science-related topics. It is his second time working at the AP, where he was chief science editor from 1996 until 1997 when he took the position of producer for ABC Discovery News, a weekly science news program, for two years. In 2003-2004, he was a John S. Knight Journalism Fellow at Stanford University where he studied linguistics, human genetics, Buddhism and the history of the American West. Crenson’s science journalism career began in 1992 at The Dallas Morning News. His awards include an Associated Press Managing Editors Award in 1997 and the Society for American Archaeology Gene S. Stuart Award in 1996. He has a B.S. from Brown University and a master’s in environmental studies from Yale University. Email: Lori Cuthbert has been at the helm of Discovery News for nine years, and has kept one goal in sight: communicating the most fascinating science news in an easily digestible format. Her main aim is to present science to people in a way that lets them absorb it and tell others about it, building a kind of popular science syndicate. In 2006, she created the first team of Web science video journalists, who have built a following with their brand of youthful, fascinating, cool clips that attempt to bring real science into the visual realm. In a long and varied journalistic career, Lori has been a beauty and food editor and writer, a foreign financial correspondent, and a science writer for Discovery.com. Her fiction and non-fiction articles have been published in The Baltimore Review, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal Europe, and Sailing, among others. Email: Larry Gonick is a mathematician turned cartoonist. Gonick believes in the potential of comics to instruct and enlighten, not merely to satirize. For the past 30 years he’s specialized in non-fiction cartooning. His books include the award-winning The Cartoon History of the Universe (Books I, II, and III), The Cartoon History of the Modern World, Part 1 (Collins, 2006), The Cartoon History of the United States (Collins, 1991), and more than half a dozen Cartoon Guides to science. For seven years, he wrote and drew Science Classics, a two-page comic-strip-cum-article for Discover magazine, and lately he’s finally branched out into “ordinary” fictional cartooning with Kokopelli and Company, a strip for Muse magazine. Kokopelli and friends hit the bookstores in 2005 with the Attack of the Smart Pies, which Gonick calls an allegory on missile defense despite its unmistakable resemblance to a children’s novel. Publication coincided with the appearance of his latest science book, The Cartoon Guide to Chemistry (Collins, 2005) (coauthored with Stanford chemist Craig Criddle). His most recent book is Cartoon History of the Modern World, Part 1, which picks up where Cartoon History of the Universe III left off. Gonick has an undergraduate degree in mathematics. Larry Gonick is a Senior Fellow at this seminar. Phone: (415) 861-4089 URL: http://www.larrygonick.com Sarah Graham is the Web producer for Science Times, where she produces multimedia and online content for the health and science sections of nytimes.com. Previously, she was an online editor for Scientific American, where she wrote news articles and edited pieces both for the Web and a popular monthly column, “Ask the Experts.” She received a bachelor's degree in chemistry from McGill University and earned master’s degrees in earth and environmental sciences and journalism from Columbia University where she specialized in science writing and new media. Email: Daniel Grossman has been a print journalist and radio and Web producer for 20 years. He has reported from all seven continents including from within 800 miles of both the south and north poles. He has produced radio stories and documentaries on science and the environment for National Public Radio’s Weekend Edition; Public Radio International’s Living on Earth show on the environment, and news magazine, The World; the Australian Broadcasting Corporation; Germany’s Deutsche Welle radio; the BBC; the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation; the documentary show Soundprint and Radio Netherlands, among other shows. He has written for The New York Times, The Boston Globe, Discover, Audubon and Scientific American, among other national publications. He has been interviewed on environmental topics more than a dozen times on national radio programs including The World, Here and Now and Living on Earth. He has produced three large Web sites on environmental topics, all of which have won national awards. He received the 2002 George Foster Peabody Award, the highest honor in broadcast, an hour-long show he produced for the DNA Files public radio documentary series. Other awards include the 2003 and 2005 Science Journalism Award of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the leading science journalism award; the 2004 and 2006 Media Award of the American Institute of Biological Sciences; a prize every year for three years straight in the Society of Environmental Journalist’s Annual Awards for Reporting on the Environment competition; and two prizes in the National Science Writers Association Science in Society Awards competition. He is coauthor of A Scientist’s Guide to Talking with the Media: Practical Advice from the Union of Concerned Scientists (Rutgers University Press, 2006). This year, with funding from the National Science Foundation and National Geographic, he is reporting on the impact of global warming on the world’s ice. He holds a Ph.D. in political science and a B.S. in physics, both from MIT. Daniel Grossman is a Senior Fellow at this seminar. Email: Amos Kenigsberg became editor for Discover magazine’s Web site in 2006, and has focused on redesign and technological upgrades due to launch in early 2007. During his tenure as Web editor, the site has seen a 40 percent increase in unique visitors and a 50 percent increase in page views. He is a member of the National Association of Science Writers. He graduated from Harvard University with an A.B. in chemistry and physics and earned an M.S. in science journalism from the Knight Center for Science & Medical Journalism at Boston University. Email: Michael D. Lemonick spent 21 years at Time magazine, where he wrote 50 cover stories on science, medicine and the environment before stepping down in January as a senior science writer. He is now a freelance writer and contributor to Time and Time.com, where he continues to write the “Eye on Science” blog. He also writes for Discover magazine and is currently working on his fourth book, a scientific biography of William Herschel. In addition, he is teaching a course at Princeton on the interaction between science and the media and will be teaching a course in journalistic ethics at New York University starting in May. His awards include Overseas Press Club’s Whitman Bassow Award for international environmental reporting (2001); American Institute of Physics Science Writing Award for “Other Worlds” (1999); American Association for the Advancement of Science Award for magazine writing (1987 and 1990); “Maxwell” award for best magazine article of the year, Dog Writers of America (1994) and the National Arbor Day Foundation Media Award (1987). Lemonick has an A.B. in economics from Harvard College and an M.S. in journalism from Columbia University. Email: Joe Palca is a science correspondent for National Public Radio. He began his journalism career in television in 1982, working as a health producer for the CBS affiliate in Washington, DC. In 1986, he left television for a seven-year stint as a print journalist, first as the Washington news editor for Nature, and then as a senior correspondent for Science. Palca has won numerous awards, including the National Academies Communications Award, the Science-in-Society Award of the National Association of Science Writers, the American Chemical Society James T. Grady-James H. Stack Award for Interpreting Chemistry for the Public, the American Association for the Advancement of Science Journalism Prize, and the Ohio State Award. Palca was president of the National Association of Science Writers from 1999-2000. He comes to journalism from a science background, having received a Ph.D. in psychology from the University of California, Santa Cruz where he worked on human sleep physiology. Email: Rebecca Perry has been a long-time visual journalist with The Los Angeles Times, and recently moved to New York, where her clients now include The New York Times. Her work has been featured on the Los Angeles Times' science pages and has won awards from the Society for News Design. She has created graphics for two Pulitzer Prize-winning stories, and spent a year as a Knight Science Journalism Fellow at MIT. She is involved with the Image and Meaning series of conferences and workshops on scientific visualization sponsored by Harvard's Institute for Innovative Computing. She holds a degree in fine arts, has nearly completed a master's degree in media studies, and will begin a doctoral program, focusing on visual science communication, this fall. Rebecca Perry is a Senior Fellow at this seminar. Email: Charles Petit has covered science for more than 35 years as a newspaper, news magazine, and freelance writer. His career includes 26 years at the San Francisco Chronicle, starting there in 1972. In 1998, he joined the staff at U.S. News & World Report and, since January 2005, has been freelancing. Recent articles have appeared in National Geographic, Smithsonian Magazine, U.S.News & World Report, and The New York Times. Since early 2006, he also has worked gathering and commenting on the day’s science news for the Knight Science Journalism Tracker, a Web site maintained by the Knight Journalism Fellowships at MIT (http://ksjtracker.mit.edu). He is a former president of both the National Association of Science Writers and the Northern California Science Writers Association, has been an instructor at the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley, and is vice president of the Council for the Advancement of Science Writing. In 1999, he won the American Association for the Advancement of Science Magazine Science Writing Award for a set of articles on fusion research, on the first peopling of the Americas, and on the computer adaptation of evolution as an engineering tool. He also received the American Geophysical Union’s David Perlman News Writing Award (2003) for a report on oceanographic changes in the North Atlantic. He has a degree in astronomy from the University of California, Berkeley. Charles Petit is a Senior Fellow at this seminar. Email: Rosalind Reid editor of American Scientist since 1992, launched the magazine’s first Web site in 1995, directed the development of a content database–driven site in 2003 and is currently directing a redesign that will incorporate Web 2.0 features. An advocate for expanding and improving the use of pictures to communicate complex scientific ideas, she has been a co-organizer and workshop presenter for the MIT/Harvard-sponsored Image and Meaning collaboration and is part of a team designing the IM Virtual Collaborative. Reid discovered science journalism after eight years as a newspaper reporter covering general news, politics and government, when she became a research writer and editor in the news office at North Carolina State University. During her 16 years at American Scientist, she has taught science-communication mini-courses at Duke University and served (in 2003) as the first Journalist in Residence at the Kavli Institute of Theoretical Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Reid is a member of the National Association of Science Writers and International Federation of Science Editors and was recently named an honorary life member of Sigma Xi, The Scientific Research Society. She holds bachelor’s degrees in political science and journalism from Syracuse University and a master’s degree in public policy sciences from Duke University. Email: Cristine Russell is an award-winning freelance journalist who has written about science, medicine and health for more than three decades. She is a Fellow at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, currently at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, and in spring, 2006, at the Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy. She is president of the Council for the Advancement of Science Writing, a group of distinguished journalists and scientists committed to improving the quality of science news reaching the public (www.casw.org). Russell was formerly a national science reporter for The Washington Post, and, earlier, The Washington Star, and has appeared on the PBS show Washington Week in Review. She is a past president of the National Association of Science Writers, a contributor to A Field Guide for Science Writers (Oxford University Press, 2005), and an honorary member of Sigma Xi, The Scientific Research Society. Russell serves on the USC Annenberg School for Communication board and on the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. Her current work focuses on the future of science writing and how the news media cover science and policy issues for the general public. Her 2006 paper, “Covering Controversial Science: Improving Reporting on Science and Public Policy,” is available online (PDF) . She has a biology degree from Mills College. Cristine Russell is a Senior Fellow at this seminar. Email: Tom Siegfried was science editor of The Dallas Morning News for 20 years before becoming a freelance science journalist based in Los Angeles. He is the author of three popular science books: The Bit and the Pendulum: How the New Physics of Information is Revolutionizing Society(Wiley, 2000), Strange Matters: Undiscovered Ideas at the Frontiers of Space and Time (National Academy Press, 2002), and A Beautiful Math: John Nash, Game Theory, and the Modern Quest for a Code of Nature (Joseph Henry Press, 2006). His work has been recognized with awards from the American Chemical Society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the National Association of Science Writers and the American Geophysical Union. He is currently on the board of directors of the Council for the Advancement of Science Writing. He earned an undergraduate degree from Texas Christian University with majors in journalism, chemistry and history, and has a Master of Arts from the University of Texas at Austin. Email: Vikki Valentine joined National Public Radio in 2001 as its first science and health Web producer. She creates multi-dimensional stories working in a number of formats — text, video, animation, sound — on topics ranging from cloning and the nature of language to an interactive feature examining the number of military and civilian fatalities in Iraq. Valentine specializes in historical features, with on-air and Web reports on topics such as the first surgeon to correct vision, war medicine, the origins of the 1918 pandemic flu, what dinner was like with our first president, and Mao Zedong's "Barefoot Doctors." She also edits the listeners' questions series for Morning Edition's Your Health segment, connecting NPR's audience with the latest advice from medical experts on topics such as sleep, weight loss, back pain and Lasik eye surgery. Prior to NPR, Valentine worked as a daily science news editor at Discovery.com and as a features editor at BaltimoreSun.com. Valentine has an M.A. from the Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at University College London. Email: Dan Vergano has been a science reporter at USA Today since 1999, and began writing a weekly online science story column in 2005. Before joining USA Today, Vergano was a medical reporter for the Medical Tribune; a researcher for PBS’ HealthWeek; a science writer intern for Science News and a space policy analyst for the Air Force. He also has freelanced for The Washington Post, Men’s Health, Science, New Scientist, Science News and ABCNews.com. He is a member of the National Association of Science Writers and won the 2006 David Perlman Award for Deadline Science Journalism from the American Geophysical Union. He has a B.S. in aerospace engineering from Pennsylvania State University and an M.A. in science, technology and public policy from George Washington University. Email: Elizabeth Weise covers science for USA Today, where she was worked since 1997. Based in San Francisco, she writes on a variety of topics including food safety, biotechnology and agriculture. She was a fellow in a 2006 Knight Digital Media Center Multimedia Seminar and was a John S. Knight Professional Journalism Fellow at Stanford University from 2001-2002, where she studied biology. Weise previously covered the Internet and high tech for USA Today and before that was the national cyberspace writer for The Associated Press. Weise began her journalism career at KUOW, Seattle’s National Public Radio affiliate. She attended the University of Lund in Sweden and is a graduate of the University of Washington in Seattle, where she majored in Swedish and minored in Chinese. Email: Alexandra Witze is a senior news and features editor at Nature magazine in Washington, D.C. She covered the physical sciences for The Dallas Morning News between 1996 and 2005, and has also worked as an editor at Earth magazine in Waukesha, Wisc. Among other exotic locales, her reporting has taken her to Mayan ruins in the jungles of Guatemala, an ocean-drilling vessel off the coast of Oregon, among rotting corpses at the University of Tennessee’s legendary “Body Farm,” and the North Pole. Among her awards, Witze numbers the Science-in-Society Award from the National Association of Science Writers; the Walter Sullivan Award for Excellence in Science Journalism - Features from the American Geophysical Union; finalist honors from the Livingston Awards three years in a row; the Katie Award from the Press Club of Dallas for specialty feature; and honorable mention in the Evert Clark Award for young science journalists. She has a bachelor’s degree in geology from MIT and a graduate certificate in science communication from the University of California, Santa Cruz. Email: |
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