NASW Fall 2005 Annual Meeting (archived)
NASW Science-in-Society
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CASW New Horizons in Science Briefing
Program and Schedule
Speaker Biographies
Look Who's Coming to NASW Science-in-Society!
C1) "Mastering the Art and Business of Editing"
Ivan Amato is just finishing his third tour of duty with Science News, this last time as the magazine's associate editor, and he is about to take on a new role as a senior editor at Chemical & Engineering News. He began his work life nearly 20 years ago rather conventionally, taking on full-time writing positions at Science News and then Science. By 1993, however, he became smitten by the cockamamie idea of writing books and freelancing, which he has done ever since, albeit most often with the comfort of a halftime, fully benefited job to keep his blood pressure within a safe range. His books include Stuff: The Materials the World Is Made of, a 1997 New York Times Notable Book, and Super Vision: A New View of Nature, a celebration of science imagery published in late 2003. Since 2000, he has spent lots and lots of time editing, mostly for Science News but also for Science. where he has overseen two year-long essay series. Next month, Amato will spend a week in Madison as the science writer in residence at the University of Wisconsin's School of Journalism and Mass Communication.
C1) "Mastering the Art and Business of Editing"
Tim Appenzeller is the science editor at National Geographic. As a boy he played with rockets and a chemistry set; in college he was an English major, so science journalism felt like a calling when he first tried it 20 years ago, at Scientific American. Since then, he's been an editor at The Sciences, the news section of Science, and U.S. News and World Report. Between editing assignments he likes to write stories, so he hasn't forgotten what it's like to be edited.
A3) "Who Speaks for Science?"
Linda Billings is a research associate with the SETI Institute, a Ph.D. candidate in mass communication at Indiana University, and a former science journalist. Her dissertation focuses on the role of journalists in maintaining the cultural authority of science. She has been studying science and risk communication for NASA's Planetary Protection Office since September 2002. Ms. Billings earned her B.A. in social sciences from the State University of New York at Binghamton and her M.A. in international transactions from George Mason University. She has worked for more than 25 years in Washington, D.C., as a journalist, freelance writer, and consultant to the government. As a journalist, she covered energy, environment, labor relations, and aerospace, primarily for the trade press. She received a Media Award from the Washington Space Business Roundtable in 1988. She is currently a member of the NASA Advisory Council's Advisory Subcommittee on Research and Technology.
A2) "Uses and Misuses of News Releases, or You did WHAT with My Release?"
Alan Boyle is not a trained scientist, but he plays one on TV. As MSNBC.com's science editor, he deals with space shots, quantum dots, nanobots and more — a virtual curiosity shop of the physical sciences plus paleontology, archaeology and other ologies that strike his fancy. He's already used up more than his allotted 15 minutes of fame on NBC's "Today," "Nightly News" and MSNBC on cable. During a quarter-century of daily journalism in Cincinnati, Spokane and Seattle, he's survived a hurricane, a volcanic eruption and an earthquake. He has faith he'll survive the Internet as well.
B1) "Strategies For Building Your Freelance Business From Any Location"
Kathryn Brown is founder and principal of EndPoint Creative, LLC. Before founding EndPoint Creative, Brown gained extensive experience in science journalism. She was a contributing correspondent for Science. for four years. Her work also appeared in Scientific American, Technology Review, Discover, Popular Science, New Scientist, and other national magazines. Brown co-authored the 1998 book Conversations About Asthma with Dr. Larry Lichtenstein of Johns Hopkins University. She won the Acoustical Society of America's Award for Science Journalism and the Clark/Payne Award for Science Journalism in 1999.
Kathryn holds a Bachelor of Journalism and Bachelor of Arts in Psychology from the University of Missouri, Columbia. She is actively involved in the Independent Public Relations Alliance (IPRA), a section of the National Capital Chapter of the Public Relations Society of America, as well as the International Association of Business Communicators, Washington Women in Public Relations, and the National Association of Science Writers.
B2) "Blogs and RSS"
Merry Bruns is an online content strategist, editor and trainer who focuses on communicating web content to its audiences clearly and effectively. Producing and editing sites since 1995, she brings a background in communications and journalism to her work.
She teaches writing and editing for the web to hundreds of students nationwide and holds classes at Georgetown University, the National Press Club, and provides in-house training to various organizations nationwide.
Her clients for content strategy and training have included Accenture, National Academy of Sciences, BBC London, Porter-Novelli, Centers for Disease Control (CDC), Towers-Perrin, World Bank, Harvard Medical School, and many more.
As principal of ScienceSites Communications, she has produced sites for numerous business, government, educational, and science organization clients.
She has been published in numerous interviews about web writing, and speaks frequently on content issues at conferences nationwide.
C2) "How To Make an Electronic Newsletter Work for You"
Emily Carlson is a science writer at NIH's National Institute of General Medical Sciences. In January, she launched the inaugural issue of Biomedical Beat, the first electronic newsletter produced by the Institute. Since then, Biomedical Beat has served as a model for two other NIGMS e-newsletters. Before joining NIH, Emily worked in the communications office at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and earned her MA in science writing from Johns Hopkins.
B4) "Fifty Writing Tools, From The Sub-Atomic To The Metaphysical"
Roy Peter Clark, founding director of the National Writers Workshop, is perhaps the nation's premiere newspaper writing coach. For three decades, he has pioneered the effort to help journalists master the craft of clear, colorful and compelling prose.
He says: "A simple blueprint for the writing process will have many uses over time. Not only will it give you confidence by demystifying the act of writing. Not only will it provide you with big boxes in which to store your [writing] tool collection. It will also help you diagnose problems in individual stories. It will help you account for your strengths and weaknesses over time. And it will build your critical vocabulary for talking about your craft, a language about language that will lead you to the next level."
Roy Peter Clark is vice president and senior scholar at the Poynter Institute, where he has taught writing since 1979. Clark is also founding director of the Institute's National Writers Workshop. He came to Poynter after working as a writing coach at the St. Petersburg Times, for which he has written numerous feature and serial narratives. He has written or co-edited five books: Free to Write: A Journalist Teaches Young Writers, Coaching Writers: Editors and Reporters Working Together, America's Best Newspaper Writing, The Craft and Values of American Journalism, and The Changing South of Gene Patterson: The Journalism of Civil Rights, 1960-1968. Clark is a Distinguished Service Member of the American Society of Newspaper Editors.
B1) "Strategies For Building Your Freelance Business From Any Location"
Dan Ferber writes regularly for Science, Popular Science, Audubon, and other magazines. His story "The Man Who Mistook his Girlfriend for a Robot," which appeared in Popular Science, won the 2004 American Society of Journalists and Authors' Outstanding Article Award for magazine profile writing. He lives in Indianapolis, Indiana, with his family.
B3) "Peer Review: A Look Behind the Curtain"
Stephen Fienberg applies statistics to a wide spectrum of problems in science and policy, from the reliability of polygraph testing to measuring discrimination. He has testified before Congress on persistent problems in the scientific literature with how statistics are used and interpreted. Fienberg is also known for ferreting out serious flaws in high-profile studies and questioning misleading "facts" that have gained media attention after appearing in some big-name journal. Fienberg is the co-founder of one journal (Chance) and has edited others; as an author, referee and National Academy of Sciences panel member, he will offer a high-level view of problems with peer review as it is actually practiced.
B3) "Peer Review: A Look Behind the Curtain"
Baruch Fischhoff focuses on the communication of risk, a frequent issue in medical, health and environmental coverage and in the journals of those fields. Like Fienberg, he has critiqued the literature of his field as a member of many National Academy review panels. Fischhoff is a frequent reviewer of social-science studies. Psychology, he says, still uses an "old-fashioned peer-review process" that largely serves the field and the public well.
B2) "Blogs and RSS"
Amy Gahran is a content strategist and info-provocateur based in Boulder, Colorado. Since 1997 she's worked independently in media (mostly online), managing projects and helping individuals, media, and organizations discover how they can best contribute to the public conversation. A former full-time journalist, editor, and managing editor from the realm of mainstream media, she now is a professional media oddball and loves it.
Amy's work involves online media (sites, blogs, feeds, forums, wikis, podcasting, e-learning) as well as freelance journalism, writing, and editing. She runs myriad workshops and seminars, and also coaches people who seek to discover their ideal writing process. Her clients include the National Governor's Association, Eastman Kodak, Zondervan, the United Nations Food & Agriculture Organization, and the National School Boards Association. She tends to annoy and inspire people in equal proportions.
She's the editor of CONTENTIOUS, which was a blog well before they had a name for that sort of publishing. She's also a co-founder of I, Reporter, a new venture to inspire, guide, and train citizen journalists and the news professionals who work with them. She contributes to the Poynter Institute's group weblog E-Media Tidbits. For more than 15 years she's worked with the Society of Environmental Journalists in various capacities, including a stint on their board.
A3) "Who Speaks for Science?"
W. Wayt Gibbs is senior writer and a member of the board of editors at Scientific American magazine. He joined the magazine in 1992, following a brief stint at the Economist and jobs as a software developer and as a writer for a supercomputer center while completing degrees in English and physics at Cornell University. Gibbs has authored some 210 bylined articles for Scientific American, covering a wide range of science and technology. For his two-part feature on "The Unseen Genome," published in November and December 2003, Gibbs was named as co-recipient of the 2004 Wistar science journalism award and recipient of the American Association for the Advancement of Science's 2005 science journalism award in the magazine category. He has lived in 13 cities and currently resides in Pittsburgh.
C3) "The Five R's of Creative Non-Fiction"
Lee Gutkind, founder and editor of the journal Creative Nonfiction, has performed as a clown for Ringling Brothers, scrubbed with heart and liver transplant surgeons, wandered the country on a motorcycle and experienced psychotherapy with a distressed family-all as research for eight books and numerous profiles and essays.
Gutkind's award-winning Many Sleepless Nights, an inside chronicle of the world of organ transplantation, has been reprinted in Italian, Korean and Japanese editions. An Unspoken Art, recently published in the Republic of China, was a Book-of-the-Month Club selection.
Former director of the writing program at the University of Pittsburgh and currently Professor of English, Gutkind has pioneered the teaching of creative nonfiction, conducting workshops and presenting readings throughout the United States. Gutkind is editor of The Creative Nonfiction Reader (a series of anthologies, from Tarcher/Putnam), and the Emerging Writers in Creative Nonfiction book series from Duquesne University Press.
In the spirit of the creative nonfiction movement, of which Harper's Magazine recently credited him as founder, Gutkind frequently crosses genres as a writer, editor and reporter. He is a published novelist, an award-winning documentary filmmaker, and he recently served as a consulting editor at National Public Radio in Washington, D.C., teaching narrative techniques to reporters, producers and editors at the Science Desk.
B1) "Strategies For Building Your Freelance Business From Any Location"
Roger Johnson is president and founder of Newswise — a collaborative resource for journalists. He developed the idea for Newswise in 1990 and began the company one year later. Roger was a biochemistry researcher at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, when, in 1976, he decided to abandon lab research for a more creative and people-oriented career in science communication. For 15 years, he worked as a journalist, writing for numerous publications, mostly as a freelancer based in Washington, D.C. Roger continued to earn a living as a freelance reporter even during the early years of Newswise. Roger has three daughters — Jessica (30), Erin (28), and Emma (4) — and one son, Zach (12), and lives with his wife, Nancy, in Charlottesville, Virginia.
A4) "How To Come Back From The Field With A Notebook Full of Narrative."
Mark Kramer, as founder of the annual Nieman Foundation narrative journalism conference, is arguably the nation's leading exponent of narrative journalism. The techniques of narrative can help writers meet the special challenge of science writing.
He says: "Science is a metaphor. Every metaphor is a narrative . . . Narrative has powers to grip readers and lead them far beyond mere cliffhanging through the richest sorts of reporting — narrative journalism has proved to be effective for organizing complex material around human stories, for exploring the routine, the personal, for handling events with complex histories, for describing processes of discovery and of personal change (for better and worse), for coordinating examinations of complex activities."
Kramer has written articles for the Boston Globe, the New York Times Magazine, National Geographic, the Atlantic Monthly, Outside. and other publications. His books include Three Farms: Making Milk, Meat and Money from the American Soil, Invasive Procedures: A Year in the World of Two Surgeons, and Travels with a Hungry Bear: A Journey to the Russian Heartland. He co-edited the anthology Literary Journalism and is writer in residence at the Nieman Foundation and director of the Nieman Program on Narrative Journalism. He was writer in residence and professor of journalism at Boston University from 1991 to 2001 and taught at Smith College for a decade before that.
- Excerpt from Travels with a Hungry Bear: A Journey to the Russian Heartland
- "Access," excerpted from Literary Journalism: A New Collection of the Best American Nonfiction
A2) "Uses and Misuses of News Releases, or You did WHAT with My Release?"
Seema Kumar is vice president, Global R&D Communications with the Pharmaceuticals business of Johnson & Johnson, where she has oversight of internal and external communications across the Johnson & Johnson Pharmaceutical R&D enterprise. Prior to joining Johnson & Johnson, she was the chief communications officer at the Whitehead Institute/Massachusetts Institute of Technology Center for Genome Research, and also chief of staff to the director of the Genome Center. She has also served as director of public affairs at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, managing editor of The NIH Catalyst, senior science writer and media relations representative at The Johns Hopkins Medical Institute and science writing fellow for the National Cancer Institute.
She has won several awards for her news and features articles on science and medicine, including the 1996 Award of Excellence in writing from the American Medical Writers Association and three Gold Medals in 2000 for Media Relations, Science Education, and Web Development. She holds a masters degree in science journalism from the University of Maryland, a bachelor of science and communication from the University of Maryland, a graduate diploma in journalism and mass communication, and a bachelor of science in physics from Stella Maris College, in Madras, India.
B3) "Peer Review: A Look Behind the Curtain"
As a doctoral student and now a postdoctoral research associate in epidemiology and rehabilitation science at the University of Pittsburgh, Faina Linkov has helped build the Global Health Network Supercourse, a public-health education initiative for the developing world that required her to develop a new system of peer review. In researching her dissertation, Linkov performed a systematic survey of peer-review mechanisms used in the public health sector. She found poor agreement on peer-review procedures, wide disparities in standards, and evidence of bias and other problems.
A2) "Uses and Misuses of News Releases, or You did WHAT with My Release?"
A'ndrea Elyse Messer has a B.A. in Science & Culture (chemistry) from Purdue, an M.S. in Journalism: Science Communications from Boston University and an M.A. in Anthropology from Penn State. She is currently an A.B.D. Ph.D. candidate in anthropology/archaeology, studying settlement pattern distribution in late 13th century puebloan societies using advanced computer applications. (In other words, she is somewhat crazy and crazed most of the time, but very, very interesting and a self described borderline geek.) She writes about engineering, the earth sciences, physical sciences and very occasionally on the life sciences. She will write medical stories only under duress. A PIO for the past 23 years, she has also edited 11 quarterly review journals (all at once), edited agricultural book translations, written technical documentation for Bell Labs (when Ma bell was Queen) and been a newspaper reporter (oh my!). She is proud to have helped publish the 1st Sesame Street book in Hebrew in Israel — The Day the Count Stopped Counting. In her spare time (?) she writes unpublished (but not unsubmitted) science fiction and plans to write a Harlequin romance when she finds time. Her seven nieces and nephews still make her sit at the kids table on holidays.
A3) "Who Speaks for Science?"
Dr. McDonald is associate vice chancellor for academic affairs, health sciences, at the University of Pittsburgh. In this capacity, she coordinates academic and public affairs initiatives within the health sciences schools and between the health sciences and other university units. She is an assistant professor of epidemiology in the University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health and a clinical instructor in psychiatry in the School of Medicine. Her research interests are health and risk communication and social marketing. Dr. McDonald received her B.A. in English and drama from the University of North Carolina, her M.F.A. from Antioch University, and her doctorate in epidemiology from the University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health. Dr. McDonald is director of a popular "Mini-Medical School" program of public lectures and organizer of an annual campus-wide "celebration of science," which showcases research under way in Pittsburgh. She is also an award-winning science writer.
C1) "Mastering the Art and Business of Editing"
Petre joined Fortune in 1979 as a reporter covering computers and office automation.
Petre co-authored It Doesn't Take a Hero with General H. Norman Schwarzkopf, which sold more than one million hardcover copies and was on the New York Times bestseller list for 25 weeks. He also co-authored another New York Times bestseller, Father, Son & Co.: My Life at IBM and Beyond, with Thomas J. Watson, Jr.
Petre has a B.A. from the University of Iowa and an M.A. in comparative literature from Johns Hopkins University.
C1) "Mastering the Art and Business of Editing"
Adrianne Rippinger has been an acquisitions editor for nearly 20 years, specializing in certificate and associate degree medical vocational textbook publishing for Delmar/Thomson Learning and Saunders/Elsevier. During that time she's seen many changes in the industry. The big trend she sees today is on the editorial side — outsourcing services such as copy editing, proofreading, design, developmental editing, and manuscript writing. Outsourcing allows publishers to reduce overhead while speeding product-to-market turnaround times in an increasingly competitive marketplace.
Adrianne was one of the first editors to team professional science writers with subject matter experts in an effort to accelerate preparation of large-scale textbook manuscripts. She has seen firsthand the benefits and pitfalls of this approach, but believes it's a trend that will continue to grow. At the end of last year, Adrianne herself became part of the outsourcing trend. She now provides freelance product development and management consulting to several large publishing houses, teaming subject matter experts with qualified science writers to prepare the manuscripts she originates.
C1) "Mastering the Art and Business of Editing"
Jeffrey Rothfeder, former national news editor at Bloomberg News, department editor at Business Week, editor in chief at PC Magazine, and executive editor at Time Inc. Custom Publishing, is currently contributing editor at Popular Science, CIO Insight, Strategy+Business, and a freelance journalist who writes frequently on business, science, technology and the environment. He's written five books; the most recent is Every Drop For Sale: Our Desperate Battle Over Water in a World About to Run Out (Putnam: 2001), which examines the world's water crises, mismanagement, pollution and the inability to get water to people who need it. He has won numerous awards including Excellence in Technology Writing, the Jesse H. Neal National Business Journalism Award and the American Society of Business Publications Editors award for feature writing. In 1999, he was a finalist for a National Magazine Award. His articles have appeared in the New York Times, Playboy, PC World, Chief Executive, St. Petersburg Times, Science, This Old House, Popular Science, CIO Insight, Consumer Reports, Forbes, Strategy+Business, and many other publications.
A1) "The NASW Pitch Slam"
Rebecca Skloot is an award-winning freelance writer and contributing editor at Popular Science magazine, where she writes "Mediascope," a column on science and the media. Skloot writes feature stories, essays and reviews for the New York Times and New York Times Magazine, National Public Radio, New York magazine, and others. She specializes in writing about science and medicine, but she's been known to cover topics ranging from food politics to packs of wild dogs in Manhattan. Her work has been collected in several anthologies, including The Best Food Writing 2005; her essay on personal genealogy testing was selected as a notable essay of 2005 by the Best American Essays. She is vice president of the National Book Critics Circle and a faculty member at the yearly Mid-Atlantic Summer Creative Nonfiction Writers Conference. She is the author of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, a narrative nonfiction book forthcoming from Crown. For more information, visit her website and blog.
B2) "Blogs and RSS"
Joel Shurkin is science writer emeritus at Stanford University and is currently freelancing in Baltimore, running two blogs — one on science and medicine and one on Jewish journalism. He was science writer on the Philadelphia Inquirer for 11 years and part of the team that won the Pulitzer Prize for covering Three Mile Island. He was a Knight Fellow at Stanford and stayed to be science writer there for 10 years. He is the author of nine published books and is finishing a biography of William Shockley to be published by Macmillan in the spring.
C1) "Mastering the Art and Business of Editing"
Tom Siegfried is a science journalist who divides his time between Arlington, Texas, and Santa Monica, Calif. He served as science editor of the Dallas Morning News from 1985 to 2004, where he trained some of the nation's top science and medical writers. He earned an undergraduate degree from Texas Christian University with majors in journalism, chemistry and history, and has a master of arts with a major in journalism and a minor in physics from the University of Texas at Austin. He began his journalism career at the Fort Worth Press and later taught journalism at Texas Christian University. He is the author of The Bit and the Pendulum, from John Wiley & Sons (2000), and Strange Matters, from the Joseph Henry Press of the National Academy of Sciences (2002). He is a contributor to the National Association of Science Writers' A Field Guide for Science Writers.
Siegfried's awards include the 2004 Science-in Society award from the National Association of Science Writers, the American Association for the Advancement of Science-Westinghouse Award for large daily newspapers and the American Chemical Society's James T. Grady-James H. Stack Award for Interpreting Chemistry for the Public. He is among the writers whose work was included in "The Best American Science Writing 2004." He currently serves on the board of the Council for the Advancement of Science Writing.
A2) "Uses and Misuses of News Releases, or You did WHAT with My Release?"
Byron Spice has covered science and medicine for daily newspapers for a quarter of a century. He has a degree in journalism and political science from Indiana University. He began his career as an education and health reporter at the Fort Wayne Journal-Gazette in Indiana and later cut his science-writing teeth at the Albuquerque Journal in New Mexico. Since 1990, he has been the science editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the largest newspaper in Western Pennsylvania. In that position, he both writes about science and medicine and coordinates the work of several medical and environmental reporters.
A3) "Who Speaks for Science?"
S. Holly Stocking teaches science writing at the Indiana University School of Journalism in Bloomington, where she has been a member of the faculty since 1986. She received her Ph.D. in mass communication from Indiana University and her master's and bachelor's degrees in journalism from Northwestern University. Her research interests include media coverage of science, technology, and the environment, with particular interest in media constructions of scientific ignorance and uncertainty. Stocking serves on the editorial board of the journal Science Communication and is an author (with Paget H. Gross) of the book How Do Journalists Think? Before she began her academic career, Stocking was a staff writer the Minneapolis Tribune and the Los Angeles Times, and a freelance writer for other media. She is the recipient of teaching awards from the Poynter Institute, Indiana University, and the Indiana University School of Journalism.
B1) "Strategies For Building Your Freelance Business From Any Location"
Rabiya Tuma, PhD, is a freelance writer who covers medicine and science. She is a regular contributor to the Economist and a corresponding writer for the Oncology Times, the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, Cure, and the Journal of Cell Biology. Her work has appeared in Discover, O Magazine, Self, and the New York Times.
Rabiya obtained her doctorate from the University of Washington in Seattle in biochemistry and her bachelor's degree in zoology from the University of California at Berkeley. She worked as a research scientist before launching her journalism career.
B2) "Blogs and RSS"
Carl Zimmer started a blog called The Loom in 2003, and the following year it won the AAAS award for online journalism. In addition to his blog, Zimmer writes for publications including the New York Times, Smithsonian, Popular Science, Science, and Discover, where he is a contributing editor. He is also the author of five books, including Soul Made Flesh, a history of neurology, and The Smithsonian Intimate Guide to Human Origins, which will be published by HarperCollins.
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