NASW 2007 Science in Society

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NASW Science in Society

October 19-20, 2007
The Davenport Hotel
Spokane, WA

Speaker Biographies

Peter Aldhous

Peter Aldhous is San Francisco bureau chief with New Scientist magazine. He got his start in journalism in 1989 as a reporter for Nature, then fresh from a PhD in animal behavior. Subsequent roles included European correspondent for Science, and news editor with New Scientist. Prior to moving to California, in October 2005, he spent five years as chief news and features editor for Nature. Peter's main interests lie in the biological and social sciences, from genetics and stem cells, through ecology and conservation, to the psychology of addiction and crime. He is a keen roving correspondent, having reported from countries including Cameroon, Cambodia, China, Indonesia, Mexico, Russia and Vietnam. His articles have won awards from the Association of British Science Writers, the UK Guild of Health Writers, the Association of Health Care Journalists and the Wistar Institute. He is also a part-time lecturer in the science communication program at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Erica Weintraub Austin

Erica Weintraub Austin (Ph.D., Stanford University) is professor and interim director of the Edward R. Murrow School of Communication at Washington State University. She has published dozens of peer-reviewed studies and book chapters focusing on children's and young adults' uses of the media in decision making. She frequently serves as a consultant to evaluate young peoples' responses to media campaigns and media literacy curricula, including as a panelist for the development of the White House National Youth Anti-Drug Campaign's statement advocating media literacy as a strategy for substance abuse prevention. She was awarded the 2001 Krieghbaum Under-40 Award from the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication. She also was named the Greater Spokane Public Relations Society of America Educator of the Year in 2005.

Janet Basu

After more than a decade as a science writer and public information representative for two science-oriented universities — Stanford and UCSF (the University of California, San Francisco) — Janet Basu has returned to freelance work. Her feature articles have appeared in publications such as American Health, The Scientist, the San Franciso Chronicle and the San Jose Mercury News; her column for the late Hippocrates Magazine won that publication's first Jesse Neal gold medal. She earned her BA from the University of California, Berkeley, and her master's degree from Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism. She is former president of the Northern California Science Writers' Association and has served on the NASW Board.

Rick Borchelt

Rick Borchelt is executive communications director for the Genetics and Public Policy, and lecturer in science policy and politics in the Hopkins Advanced Academic Programs division. He career in science communications and science public policy includes stints as media relations director for the National Academy of Sciences; press secretary for the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Science, Space and Technology; and special assistant for public affairs in the Clinton White House. He is a past president of the D.C. Science Writers Association.

Alan Boyle

As MSNBC.com's science editor, Alan Boyle runs a virtual curiosity shop of the physical sciences and space exploration, plus paleontology, archaeology and other ologies that strike his fancy. Since joining MSNBC.com in 1996, Boyle has won awards from the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the National Association of Science Writers, the Pirelli Relativity Challenge, the Space Frontier Foundation, the Western Washington Pro Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists and the CMU Cybersecurity Journalism Awards. He is a contributor to A Field Guide for Science Writers, the president of the Northwest Science Writers Association, the blogger behind Cosmic Log (which marked its fifth anniversary this year) — and an occasional talking head on the MSNBC cable channel. During his 30 years of daily journalism, Boyle has served in editing and writing roles at The Cincinnati Post, The Spokesman-Review in Spokane and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer as well as at MSNBC.com. He's survived a hurricane, a volcanic eruption, a total solar eclipse, a zero-gravity airplane flight and an earthquake — and he has faith he'll survive the Internet as well.

Alan S. Brown

Alan S. Brown is clearly the least educated member of his panel. He has been an editor, contract editor, and freelance writer for more than 25 years. The publications and Websites he has edited range from Homeland Response, Performance Materials, and Advanced Coatings & Surface Technologies to Chemical Online, Pharmaceutical Online, and Family Days Away. He is an associate editor of Mechanical Engineering, contributes to a several engineering and scientific publications, and teaches short courses to help engineers communicate more effectively. A magna cum laude graduate of New College at Hofstra University, he is a former co-chair of the Science Writers in New York. You can reach him with questions, comments, and lucrative proposals at insight@comcast.net.

Marian Burros

Marian Burros is a food columnist for the New York Times where she has worked for 21 years. She has over 30 years experience as a writer, editor and reporter covering food and consumer issues. She has authored 13 food and cookbooks, including Cooking for Comfort (April, 2003); The New Elegant but Easy Cookbook; Eating Well is the Best Revenge; 20 Minute Menus, The Best of Degustibus, You've Got It Made; Keep It Simple; Pure and Simple; and the Summertime Cookbook. She is the recipient of numerous awards and honors including: an Emmy award for consumer reporting; Consumer Federation of America's Betty Furness Consumer Media Service Award; Tastemaker Award for best cookbook; Who's Who in American Food; and the National Press Club Award for health and consumer reporting. She has worked as a writer and editor for the Washington Post, the Washington Star, United Features, NBC Radio Network News, WRC-TV in Washington, DC and United Features. She earned her B.A. degree from Wellesley College.

Siri Carpenter

Siri Carpenter is a science writer in Madison, Wisconsin. As a social psychologist by training, she specializes in behavioral science topics, although she's written about a lot of other things, too. She has written for Science, Scientific American Mind, Prevention, the HHMI Bulletin, ScienceNOW, Science News, Reuters Health, and many others. She is first author of Visualizing Psychology, published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., in 2007. Her web site is www.siricarpenter.com.

Leah Ceccarelli

Leah Ceccarelli is an associate professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Washington. Her research focus is the rhetoric of science — that is, she analyzes the means of persuasion used by scientists and by politicians when they speak or write about science. Her award-winning book, Shaping Science with Rhetoric, examines the subtle language tools used by scientists who sought to motivate their colleagues across disciplinary borders to engage in collaborative research. Her more recent work has been on metaphors in public communication about controversial science. She holds an MA and PhD in communication studies from Northwestern University, and an AB in rhetoric and in biology from the University of California at Berkeley.

Glennda Chui

After 22 years at the San Jose Mercury News, where she covered science and edited science, health and environment coverage, Glennda Chui left in 2007 to become deputy editor of symmetry, a magazine put out by Stanford Linear Accelerator Center and Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. She also teaches in the science communication program at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She shared a staff Pulitzer Prize for coverage of the 1989 Loma Prieta quake, and in 2001 received the American Geophysical Union's David Perlman Award for Excellence in Science Journalism — News.

David Darlington

David Darlington is the author of Zin: The History and Mystery of Zinfandel, among other books, and writes the "Short Finish" column for Wine & Spirits magazine. As a writer, he is drawn to examine the relationship between people and landscapes. In this vein, he is also the author of several books, including The Mojave: A Portrait of the Definitive American Desert and Area 51 — The Dreamland Chronicles. He has also written widely for magazines including Outside, Audubon, Bicycling, Sierra, Life, and The New York Times Magazine.

Bob Finn

Bob Finn is San Francisco Bureau Chief for the International Medical News Group for whom he (mostly) covers medical conferences. He's been with IMNG, working from his home office, for 6 years. Before that he freelanced for 9 years, during which he wrote two books and hundreds of magazine articles. And before that he was senior science writer at the California Institute of Technology. Bob served as NASW cybrarian for 7 years, during which he presided over NASW's transition to the wild world of the World Wide Web. He's in his second term as a member of NASW's board.

Lynne Friedmann

Lynne Friedmann is a freelance writer and editor, following a 25-year career as a science communications specialist to biotech, academic research, and scientific professional organizations. Along the way, she served as public information representative for the Developmental Biology Center at the University of California, Irvine; was west coast media representative for the National Academy of Sciences; and served as interim director of Public Relations for The Salk Institute. She now writes for newspapers, magazines, and the Web in addition to teaching science writing through UC San Diego Extension.

Helen Gallagher

Helen Gallagher launched Computer Clarity, a software consulting and training business in 1996 after a long corporate career in executive positions at Jim Beam Brands, Envirodyne Industries, and Ameritech, (AT&T). At a time when people most needed a little help getting started with computers and the Internet, she began personal, customized training and teaching workshops to bridge the gap between people and technology. Although Chicago-based, her work takes her to Arizona, Michigan, Missouri, and the west coast. Today, her thriving consulting practice is augmented by her writing on business and technology. She is the author of Computer Ease, chosen by Forbes.com Book Club and an Illinois Women's Press Association award winner in 2006. Her new book Release Your Writing: Book Publishing Your Way will be released in August 2007. Helen also serves as a publishing advisor to clients who want to fulfill the desires to publish their books. As a tech speaker, Helen presents to audiences throughout the Midwest, bridging the gap between people and technology. At the 2006 Midwest Literary Festival she is proud to have survived a time slot opposite Joyce Carol Oates.

Peggy Girshman

Peggy Girshman joined Congressional Quarterly in July, 2007 as executive editor of consumer publishing, to lead a new initiative that will build up CQ's web, multimedia and related free-to-consumer outlets. Prior to that she was a managing editor at National Public Radio, and a broadcast journalist for 31 years. She spent her formative years working as a science segment producer for commercial stations in Washington DC, for WNET-TV, and as the senior producer for several PBS series, including Scientific American Frontiers and a 26-part series on statistics, and was a senior medical producer at Dateline NBC for 2 1/2 years. Girshman has held several editor positions at National Public Radio — in science, domestic news, as deputy managing editor and managing editor of its News 2.0 Division. She was part of three start-up operations: Satellite News Channel (competition for CNN), Monitor News Channel (Christian Science Monitor) and Video News International (a NY Times company attempting to pioneer the use of small format video journalism). She has held journalism fellowships at the Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory and at MIT. She is the winner of a national Emmy award and 4 local Emmy awards and a co-winner of the AAAS science-writing prize and two Peabody awards for covering health care. She serves on the boards of NASW and of the Journalism Fellowships for Child and Family Policy. She has helped select journalists for the MIT Knight fellowship, served on the National Academy of Engineering "Engineer of 2020" panel and is a judge for the Keck Communications Awards, a major science communication prize awarded by the National Academies of Sciences.

Laura Helmuth

Laura Helmuth is a senior editor for Smithsonian magazine. She assigns and edits most of the magazine's stories about science, nature, and technology. Before joining Smithsonian, she worked for Science magazine's news department for five years. She has written for National Wildlife, California Wild, Science News, various websites and small newspapers, and a travel guide to Eastern Europe. She has a Ph.D. in cognitive neuroscience from the University of California at Berkeley.

Emma Hitt

Emma Hitt, PhD, is owner of Emma Hitt Medical Writing, LLC, currently a 3-employee company, in business since 2001. Emma writes in many genres of medical writing, but specializes in preparing oncology-related continuing medical education materials. She is past president of the Southeast Chapter of the American Medical Writers Association. Emma also mentors individuals interested in pursuing a career in science or medical writing and is owner of the Jobslist, a free weekly email containing medical and science writing jobs. For more information please visit www.emmasciencewriter.com/.

Jan L. Kardys

Jan L. Kardys has over 20 years' diversified publishing experience for eight major publishing corporations. She was the Director of Contracts at Warner Books/Little Brown and Co., Director of Contracts at Macmillan Publishing Co. and Contracts Director at Prentice Hall/Simon and Schuster. Ms. Kardys has worked at Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Doubleday, Scholastic, Lippincott & Crowell, Publishers and St. Martin's Press in editorial, subsidiary rights and production.

Christopher Kenneally

At Copyright Clearance Center, Christopher Kenneally is responsible for organizing and hosting programs that address the business needs of authors of all backgrounds. He is host and moderator for "Beyond the Book," an ongoing series of writing conferences frequently broadcast nationally on C-SPAN's Book-TV and in Canada on BookTelevision. Author of Massachusetts 101, Kenneally has reported on education, travel, and technology for the New York Times, Boston Globe, Los Angeles Times, The Independent of London, and many other leading publications, as well as for WGBH-TV (Boston).

Michael Lemonick

Michael Lemonick was on the staff of TIME magazine for more than 20 years, where he wrote approximately 50 cover stories about science and medicine. He is now a freelance writer, contributing to TIME (where he writes the Eye on Science blog), Discover and other magazines. He has written three books: The Light at the Edge of the Universe, Other Worlds and Echo of the Big Bang and is working on his fourth. He contributed the chapter on space science to the NASW book, A Field Guide For Science Writers. Lemonick has taught at Princeton, Johns Hopkins, Columbia and NYU, and has won several science writing prizes, including awards from the AAAS and the American Institute of Physics. Lemonick was born in Princeton, New Jersey, where he still lives. He received a B.A. from Harvard University and a M.S. in journalism from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.

Doug Levy

Doug Levy is the director of communications/special assistant to the dean at the UCSF School of Medicine. Before joining UCSF in 2004, Levy spent two decades covering science, health, medicine and technology for a variety of broadcast and print media. His investigative reporting garnered numerous awards, including a Peabody. As medical reporter for USA Today from 1993-1999, Levy covered the tobacco industry, medical ethics, general health news and medical research. Previously, he was science editor at UPI and served in various capacities at NPR, the Mutual Broadcasting System and the NBC Radio Networks, among others. In 1988-1989, Levy was assistant director in the office of public affairs at the Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions, where he produced a daily radio medical news report that was syndicated nationally.

Robin Mejia

Robin Mejia writes about science, technology and people. Over the past year, she's covered Internet crime fighters, a survey of war crimes in Sierra Leone, and a project using commercial satellites to monitor villages in Darfur that human rights researchers can't reach on the ground. Her work has appeared in New Scientist, Popular Science, Science, the Washington Post Magazine, Wired and other outlets. She won the 2005 Livingston Award for Young Journalists for her one and only documentary, a CNN Presents special called "Reasonable Doubt," which looked at how forensic science problems have led to wrongful convictions.

Steve Miller

Steve Miller is a freelance writer specializing in materials science topics and curriculum materials. He began writing while working as an analytical chemist and became a fulltime freelancer in 1999. While most of his current work involves science and math materials for grades 3-12, he reviews products for Analytical Chemistry, writes press releases for Penn State's Eberly College of Science, and edits journal articles and grant proposals for the Materials Research Institute at Penn State. Previously, Steve wrote and edited Superconductor Week, a newsletter for the superconductor industry, and co-authored High-Performance Manufacturing, a professional development text based on certification standards. You can reach him at stevemiller@nasw.org.

Chris Mooney

Chris Mooney is Washington correspondent for Seed magazine and author of the bestselling book The Republican War on Science, dubbed "a landmark in contemporary political reporting" by Salon.com and a "well-researched, closely argued and amply referenced indictment of the right wing's assault on science and scientists" by Scientific American. His next book, entitled Storm World: Hurricanes, Politics, and the Battle Over Global Warming, was published in July of 2007 by Harcourt Books.

Rashmi Nemade

Rashmi Nemade, Ph.D., owns her own biomedical writing company, BioMedText, Inc., based in Columbus, Ohio. She received her B.A. in Biology from Boston University and her Ph.D. from the Program in Molecular Developmental Biology at the University of Cincinnati and Children's Hospital Medical Center in Cincinnati, Ohio. She was a postdoctoral fellow in the Laboratory of Genetics and Physiology at the National Institutes of Health before becoming a Regulatory Compliance Specialist at Technical Resources International, Inc. in Bethesda, Maryland. She can be contacted at rashmi.nemade@gmail.com.

Rebecca Perry

Rebecca Perry, a long-time visual journalist with The Los Angeles Times, recently moved to New York, where her clients now include the New York Times. Her work has been featured on the L.A. 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 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. She is involved with the Image and Meaning series of conferences and workshops on scientific visualization sponsored by Harvard's Institute for Innovative Computing.

Charlie Petit

Charlie Petit currently tracks the day's science news in the US and international, English language daily press-including wires, newspapers, and broadcast-for a web log maintained by the Knight Science Journalism Fellowships at MIT (ksjtracker.mit.edu). His career includes 26 years as a science reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle and six years for US News & World Report. Recent freelance stories have run in such publications as National Geographic, Smithsonian, Air & Space, and the New York Times. A former president of NASW, and now vice president of the Council for the Advancement of Science Writing, he is a past winner of the NASW's Science-in-Society award, of prizes from the American Institute of Physics and the American Geophysical Union, and is a two-time winner of the AAAS prize in science writing.

Tabitha M. Powledge

Tabitha M. Powledge is a long-time science and medical journalist and editor, writing for both general and professional audiences. She is also a long-time digitizer, always in pursuit of the fantasy that it makes her work easier and faster. She evaluated writerly software and hardware regularly in the ScienceWriters column "The Free Lance," which she wrote for 7 years. A full-time freelance since 1990, she was also Founding Editor of The Scientist and Senior Editor at what is now Nature Biotechnology. She has written for, among others, Scientific American, Popular Science, Health, Salon.com, Archaeology, and the Washington Post, and also for journals such as The Lancet, Current Biology, PLOS Biology, and Nature Medicine, as well as other science pubs like The Scientist and the late, lamented, BioMedNet.com. Her book, The Complete Idiot's Guide to Microbiology, co-authored with a microbiologist, was published last November. She also wrote Your Brain: How You Got It and How It Works (Scribner's, 1995). She's serving her third term on the NASW board and is also on the Web and freelance committees.

Barbara Rasco

Barbara Rasco, PhD JD is an internationally recognized authority in food safety laws and regulations. She has over 25 years experience conducting research in food analysis, food processing, food safety and security, and food products liability, including over 15 years industry and academic experience. She is Professor of Food Science and Human Nutrition at Washington State University in Pullman, Washington and a former fellow of the Institute of Food Technologists.

Rosalind Reid

Rosalind Reid is Editor of American Scientist, the illustrated magazine of Sigma Xi, The Scientific Research Society. She will take a leave this fall to serve as a Fellow at the Initiative in Innovative Computing at Harvard. After creating Sigma Xi's "Picturing Research" workshops in 2001 to help scientists explore how to visually communicate their work, she became a co-organizer of the Image and Meaning workshops. The first Journalist in Residence at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics (2003), she is primarily interested in integrating illustrations and text in narrative science journalism and finding accessible visual language for the interpretation of science. Before joining American Scientist in 1990, she spent eight years in newspaper journalism and then served as research news editor at North Carolina State University

Lisa Rossi

Lisa Rossi is director of communications and external relations for the Microbicide Trials Network (MTN), a National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases HIV/AIDS clinical trials network based at the University of Pittsburgh. In this capacity, she oversees media relations for studies at 17 clinical trial sites in seven countries. Prior to joining the MTN in 2007, Rossi spent 23 years with the News Bureau for the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center and the University of Pittsburgh Schools of the Health Sciences, the last 13 as associate director. For most of her News Bureau tenure, Rossi covered the University of Pittsburgh's internationally renowned organ transplant programs. In 2005, Rossi was named a Marine Biological Laboratory Science Journalism Fellow, the only public information officer in a class of 12 fellows and one of only a few ever chosen in the program's 20-year history.

Cristine Russell

Cristine Russell is a freelance journalist who has written about science, health and the environment for more than three decades. She is currently a fellow at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs and was a spring 2006 fellow at Harvard's Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy. She has been studying the future of science journalism, particularly newspaper coverage; how controversial science is covered by the media; and how the media has covered global warming. She is President of the Council for the Advancement of Science Writing and a past president of the National Association of Science Writers. She is a contributor to A Field Guide for Science Writers. Russell is a former national science reporter for The Washington Post and The Washington Star and appeared on PBS' Washington Week in Review. She serves on the boards of the USC Annenberg School for Communication and the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. She has won numerous science-writing awards and is an honorary member of Sigma Xi, the scientific research society. Russell has a biology degree from Mills College.

Michael Shermer

Dr. Michael Shermer is the Founding Publisher of Skeptic magazine and the Executive Director of the Skeptics Society. He is an author, speaker, and producer, about whom Stephen Jay Gould said the following: "Michael Shermer, as head of one of America's leading skeptic organizations, and as a powerful activist and essayist in the service of this operational form of reason, is an important figure in American public life." (From the foreword to Why People Believe Weird Things) Dr. Shermer is a contributing editor and monthly columnist for Scientific American, and is the host of the Skeptics Distinguished Lecture Series at Caltech. He is also the co-host and producer of the Fox Family television series, Exploring the Unknown, and serves as the science correspondent for KPCC radio, an NPR affiliate for Southern California. Dr. Shermer is the author of Science Friction: Where the Known Meets the Unknown, about how the mind works and how thinking goes wrong. His book The Science of Good and Evil: Why People Cheat, Gossip, Share Care, and Follow the Golden Rule, is on the evolutionary origins of morality and how to be good without God. He also wrote Why People Believe Weird Things, a book that was widely and positively reviewed, and landed on the Los Angeles Times bestseller list as well as the New Sciences science books bestseller list in England. How We Believe: Science, Skepticism, and the Search for God presents his theory on the origins of religion and why people believe in God. Dr. Shermer's books also include In Darwin's Shadow, a biography of Alfred Russel Wallace, the co-discoverer of natural selection, The Borderlands of Science, which explores the fuzzy boundary between science and pseudoscience, and Denying History, which takes on Holocaust denial and other forms of historical distortion. Dr. Shermer is also the author of Teach Your Child Science and co-author of Teach Your Child Math and Mathemagics. Dr. Shermer received his B.A. in psychology from Pepperdine University, M.A. in experimental psychology from California State University, Fullerton, and his Ph.D. in the history of science from Claremont Graduate School. He worked as a college professor for 20 years (1979-1998), teaching psychology, evolution, and the history of science at Occidental College, California State University Los Angeles, and Glendale College. Since his creation of the Skeptics Society, Skeptic magazine, and the Skeptics Distinguished Lecture Series at Caltech, he has appeared on such shows as 20/20, Dateline, Charlie Rose, Tom Snyder, Donahue, Oprah, Sally, Leeza, Unsolved Mysteries, and more as a skeptic of weird and extraordinary claims. Dr. Shermer has also appeared in documentaries aired on A&E, Discovery, PBS, The History Channel, The Science Channel, and The Learning Channel. For more information about Dr. Michael Shermer, read his curriculum vitae. He can be contacted at mshermer@skeptic.com.

James (Jamie) Shreeve

James (Jamie) Shreeve is the science editor at National Geographic Magazine, a position he assumed in 2006 after 25 years as a science writer and book author. His most recent book is The Genome War: How Craig Venter Tried to Capture the Code of Life and Save the World (Knopf 2004). His previous books include The Neandertal Enigma: Solving the Mystery of Modern Human Origins (William Morrow, 1995); Lucy's Child: The Discovery of a Human Ancestor (with Donald Johanson, William Morrow, 1989); and Nature: The Other Earthlings (MacMillan, 1987). Mr. Shreeve received his B.A. in English from Brown University in 1973. A 1979 graduate of the Iowa Writers Workshop, he contributed fiction to various literary magazines before turning to science writing, first as Public Information Officer at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. He has been awarded fellowships from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and the Alicia Patterson Foundation, and has contributed stories to The Atlantic Monthly, National Geographic, The New York Times Magazine, Science, Wired, and other publications. Mr. Shreeve splits his work week between Washington and Maplewood, New Jersey, where he lives with his wife Jessica Falcon Shreeve.

Lee Siegel

Lee Siegel is science news specialist for University of Utah Public Relations. A native of Portland and a graduate of the University of Oregon, Siegel earned a master's degree at the Columbia University School of Journalism. He was a member of the staff of The Daily News of Longview, Wash., when the staff won a Pulitzer Prize for coverage of the 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens. Siegel joined the Associated Press in 1981 and from 1984-1993 served as one of AP's national science writers, based in Los Angeles. He was science editor for The Salt Lake Tribune for eight years; among his honors is the 1996 Utah Seismic Safety Commission's first annual award for Outstanding Contribution to Earthquake Safety in Utah, in recognition of Siegel's coverage of the gap between geophysical data and seismic-safety codes in the state. He joined the University of Utah staff in 2000. With geophysicist Robert. B. Smith, Siegel is co-author of Windows into the Earth: The Geologic Story of Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks.

Jane Ellen Stevens

Jane Ellen Stevens teaches multimedia reporting at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. She is a freelance multimedia journalist who has done multimedia reporting for The New York Times, Discovery Channel, and MSNBC.com. She has worked at the Boston Globe and San Francisco Examiner as copy editor, assistant foreign/national editor, Sunday magazine writer, and technology reporter and columnist. She founded a syndicated science and technology feature service with 20 newspaper clients worldwide, including the Los Angeles Times, the Dallas Morning News, The Washington Post, and Asahi Shimbun's AERA Magazine. For four years, she lived and worked in Kenya and Indonesia. She's written for magazines, including National Geographic, and worked for New York Times Television as a videojournalist. She is director of the Violence Reporting Project, which encourages news organizations to include a scientific and public health approach to crime reporting. She has a bachelor's degree in zoology from the University of Kentucky and a master's degree in communications from the University of Georgia.

Jonathan Thompson

Jonathan Thompson is Associate Editor at High Country News, a regional news magazine that covers environmental, cultural and other issues affecting the American West. He handles the news and profiles in the front of the book. Thompson's background is in small-town journalism: He started his own literary/news journal in tiny Silverton, Colorado, and later bought the weekly newspaper in that town and ran it for several years. He's looking for fresh stories, relevant to the region, that will surprise, and maybe provoke, HCN's knowledgeable readers.

Vikki Valentine

Vikki Valentine joined NPR in 2001 as NPR's 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, who has an M.A. from the Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at University College London, specializes in historical features, with on-air and Web reports on 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 lives in Washington, D.C., with her hopelessly overweight but nonetheless very handsome cats, Tito and Cricket. Her hobbies include ballet and uncovering as many disgusting details about historical diseases as her spare time permits.

Peter Weiss

Peter Weiss joined the staff of the American Geophysical Union, or AGU, in January 2007. AGU is the world's largest organization of scientists who study Earth and the solar system. Prior to switching to public information at AGU, Peter worked for nearly nine years as the physics/technology reporter for Science News. Earlier, he was a newspaper reporter for five years, covering two nuclear weapons laboratories in California. Peter has freelanced for Science, New Scientist, the San Jose Mercury News, Health magazine, the Exploratorium museum, and others. He is a graduate of the UC Santa Cruz science communication program.

Ron Winslow

Ron Winslow is deputy editor, health and science, and a senior medical and health care writer for the Wall Street Journal. In the past 17 years, he has written more than 1,100 articles describing new medical and health care research and chronicling the forces of economics and innovation that are transforming the U.S. health care system. As deputy editor, he also helps edit and oversee the paper's health and medical coverage. Winslow joined the Journal in 1983 as a reporter covering electric utilities and later was a reporter and editor covering technology, science and energy. He returned to reporting as a senior special writer covering health and medicine in 1989. He was named to his current position in 2000. He is the author of Hard Aground, the story of the Argo Merchant oil spill, and co-author of Open and Shut, both published by W.W. Norton. He collaborated with other writers on NOVA, a book that marked the 10th anniversary of the PBS science program, Nova. In 2003, Winslow received the American Heart Association's Howard L. Lewis Award for his coverage of cardiovascular disease for "consumers, practitioners, policymakers and business people." His work has also been honored by the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill and other groups. He is a member of the National Association of Science Writers and was a founding board member of the Association of Health Care Journalists.

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