Officers

Nancy Shute, president
Freelance

Nancy Shute is an award-winning journalist who has worked as a writer and editor for national magazines, a television and radio reporter, and an instructor of science writing and multimedia journalism.

She directed science and technology coverage for U.S. News & World Report, where she was assistant managing editor. She also served as a senior writer and blogger for U.S. News, covering health policy, neuroscience, pediatrics, infectious disease, and public health law. She now contributes to National Public Radio, National Geographic, Scientific American, and other publications. Shute trains journalists in the uses of social media and other new technologies, and teaches science writing at Johns Hopkins University’s Advanced Academic Programs. She is a frequent guest on national radio and television.

Prior to joining U.S. News in 1997, she was a correspondent for Outside magazine and contributed to many other publications, including the New York Times, Washington Post, Smithsonian, New Republic, and National Review. Shute graduated from Washington University in St. Louis with a bachelor’s in English literature and received a master’s from Yale Law School in 1980. As a Fulbright Scholar, she founded the first bilingual independent newspaper in Kamchatka, Russia.

Nancy has been active in NASW for many years as a volunteer and board member. She became NASW president in November 2010.

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Peggy Girshman, vice president
Kaiser Health News

Peggy Girshman is an executive editor at Kaiser Health News, a non-profit news service covering the practice of medicine, health care policy, health financing and the politics of health care reform. Previously, she was an Executive Editor at Congressional Quarterly. She held a number of jobs at National Public Radio, including deputy senior science editor, deputy national editor, assistant managing editor and, was also one of several managing editors. She served as senior medical producer at Dateline NBC, senior producer at the PBS programs Scientific American Frontiers and Against All Odds: Inside Statistics. She has also worked at local television stations in Washington, D.C., and helped launch a start-up that eventually became New York Times television.

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Ron Winslow, treasurer
Wall Street Journal

I've been a reporter and editor at the Wall Street Journal for 26 years, the last 20 covering health and medicine. I'm currently deputy bureau chief of the health and science group, a role in which I both cover and help shape our coverage of medicine, the pharmaceutical and device industries and the health-care system.

My main coverage responsibilities include biotechnology, cardiology and oncology. During my initial years on the health beat, I focused on health policy and health economics. Prior to that, I covered the electric utility and nuclear power industries, spent a brief stint as a technology columnist and served as science and technology editor on our national news desk.

Earlier in my career, I taught journalism at the University of New Hampshire, my alma mater. I started my newspaper career at the Providence (R.I.) Journal. I am the author of Hard Aground, the Story of the Argo Merchant Oil Spill; co-author of Open and Shut (a true crime story) and was a co-writer of NOVA, the book published in commemoration of the 10th anniversary of the PBS science program.

I was a founding board member of the Association of Health Care Journalists. I joined NASW in 1990.

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Beryl Lieff Benderly, secretary
Freelance

Prize-winning freelance journalist Beryl Lieff Benderly writes the monthly “Taken for Granted” column for the Science magazine website, is a contributing editor of Prism magazine, and contributes articles to other publications including Scientific American, Slate, Miller-McCune, Science Progress and many more. Elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, she is the author or co-author of seven trade books, including the classic DANCING WITHOUT MUSIC: DEAFNESS IN AMERICA, which has marked its thirtieth year in print, and of a novel for middle readers. A winner of the Diane McGurgan Award, and she serves NASW's liaison to the Authors Coalition of America and on the Coalition's distribution committee.

Board members-at-large

Terry Devitt
University of Wisconsin-Madison/The Why Files

Terry Devitt is director of Research Communications for the University of Wisconsin-Madison. For the past 24 years Devitt has covered the basic and applied sciences at UW-Madison. He also edits and is the project coordinator for The Why Files, a popular and critically successful site about science and technology published on the World Wide Web (whyfiles.org) under the auspices of the UW-Madison Graduate School. Devitt is an active freelance science writer and has contributed to such publications as Astronomy, Orion, the Los Angeles Times Syndicate, the Milwaukee Journal, the American Heart Association, the Bulletin of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and the children's science magazine Muse. Devitt's awards include the 2001 Science Journalism Award from the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Society of Professional Journalists Sigma Delta Chi Award for In-depth Reporting. In 1997, he was the recipient of a Council for the Advancement and Support of Education (CASE) Gold Award for his work helping to develop The Why Files. In 2007, he was elected a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Devitt also serves on the executive board of the National Association of Science Writers.

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Dan Ferber
Freelance

Dan Ferber is an award-winning freelance journalist and a contributing correspondent for Science. His work has also appeared in many other national publications, including Reader’s Digest, Popular Science, New Scientist, Audubon, Nature Conservancy, Sierra, and Women’s Health. He is the coauthor, with Paul Epstein, MD, of Changing Planet, Changing Health: How the Climate Crisis Threatens Our Health and What We Can Do About It (University of California Press, 2011). His professional honors include an Outstanding Article Award for best magazine profile writing from the American Society of Journalists and Authors, inclusion in the anthology, Best of Technology Writing 2006, four awards from the Society of Professional Journalists, and the Diane McGurgan award for service to NASW. Dan holds a B.S. in biology from Duke, a Ph.D. in biology from Johns Hopkins University, and an M.S. in journalism from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

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Bob Finn
Medscape Medical News

As a two-term board member my main focus has been NASW's Science in Society Awards. Each year I've worked hard to assemble a stellar list of judges and have shepherded several hundred entries through the process. At present, I'm leading an effort to re-examine the S-I-S awards. Do our current categories make sense? Should there be more, fewer? How should the S-I-S Awards Committee chair be guided in selecting judges free of conflicts of interest? Are the judging criteria clear enough? Is the $2,500 prize adequate? I look forward to a stimulating discussion on these matters, and I hope to be re-elected to the board to implement any changes that are recommended. I also hope to find a way, probably outside the S-I-S structure, to honor outstanding work from NASW members on the public information end of things. As a former PIO (Caltech), freelancer, and current staff journalist, I believe I can represent three of NASW's main constituencies on matters relating to the awards and also to the many other issues requiring board discussion.

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Deborah Franklin
Freelance

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Jeff Grabmeier
Ohio State University

Jeff Grabmeier is director of research communications at Ohio State University, where he has worked since 1985. At Ohio State, Jeff is the principal writer covering research in the social sciences, business and humanities. He has three times won the top award for “Research, Medicine and Science Writing” from the Council for Advancement and Support of Education. Jeff co-chairs the Education Committee of the National Association of Science Writers, and is a past columnist for the association’s newsletter ScienceWriters. In addition, he is the recipient of the Diane McGurgan award for service to NASW. He has done freelance writing for several consumer and college magazines and has written chapters for the books “Soul of the Sky” and “Taking Sides: Clashing Views on Controversial Issues in Family and Personal Relationships.” In 2009, Jeff was elected fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Before coming to Ohio State, Jeff was a reporter for the Gallipolis Daily Tribune and the Columbus Citizen-Journal. He has a B.S. in journalism from Ohio University and an M.A. in political science from Ohio State.

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Michael Lemonick
Climate Central

Michael D. Lemonick is the senior writer at Climate Central, a nonprofit organization dedicated to presenting nonpartisan science-based information about climate change to policymakers and the general public. Prior to joining Climate Central, he spent nearly 21 years at TIME Magazine, where he wrote more than 50 cover stories on topics ranging from climate change to genomics to particle physics before stepping down as a Senior Science Writer in early 2007. He remains a Contributing Writer at TIME, and also continues to freelance for Discover, Scientific American, National Geographic, Yale E360 and Newsweek and other magazines. Lemonick is the author of four popular books on astronomy, and is working on his fifth, on the search for Earthlike exoplanets. He has taught science and environmental writing at Princeton, Columbia, Johns Hopkins and New York Universities. His professional honors include two AAAS-Westinghouse awards for magazine writing; the American Institute of Physics Science Writing Award, and the Overseas Press Club's Whitney Bassow Award for International Environmental Reporting. He holds an A.B. in Economics from Harvard College and an M.S. in Journalism from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.

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Robin Lloyd
Scientific American

Robin Lloyd is News Editor, Online, at Scientific American. Previously, she was a senior editor for LiveScience.com and SPACE.com. She has additional experience in print journalism (Pasadena Star–News); wire journalism (City News Service of Los Angeles); and cable network online journalism (CNN.com). She has a Ph.D. in sociology from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and received a Knight Science Journalism Fellowship at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for the 1998–99 academic year.

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Rosie Mestel
Los Angeles Times

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Tabitha M. Powledge
Freelance

Radical changes in markets for science writers dominate our work lives, especially the rise of Web-based publications and bloggery. That's why, a year ago, I started writing On ScIence Blogs This Week, a weekly mini-aggregation of selected blog posts of professional interest to science writers. It appears on the NASW home page (www.nasw.org) every Friday. In the eight years I have been a Board member, NASW has become more activist and concerned about professional and business issues like electronic rights and contracts, plagiarism, and the ethics of the new, Web-based journalism. For seven years before I joined the Board, I wrote about such changes in the ScienceWriters column "The Free Lance." I am also a long-time member of the freelance and Internet committees.

I was founding editor of The Scientist and an editor at what is now Nature Biotechnology. A full-time freelance since 1990, I have written for paper publications that include Scientific American, Popular Science, Health magazine, PLOS Biology, The Scientist, Washington Post, BioScience, and The Lancet. My book The Complete Idiot's Guide to Microbiology came out in 2007, and I am working far too slowly on a second edition of my 1994 book Your Brain: How You Got It and How It Works. Like many freelances, I write more and more for Web publications, including SciAm, The Scientist, Salon.com, and the late HMS Beagle/BioMedNet.com. For the past three years I have also contributed to the technology blog Popgadget.net. I do freelance editing too, mostly for the National Academy of Science's public policy magazine, Issues in Science and Technology.

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Adam Rogers
Wired

Adam Rogers is a Senior Editor at Wired magazine in San Francisco. He edits feature stories about science, politics, military and law enforcement technology, and culture, as well as serving as an editor of the front-of-the-book Start and Play sections. Adam also writes for the magazine — he has covered stem cell research funding, online scientific journals, the technology of Cirque du Soleil, and the deeper meaning of the movie Tron. And he’s the host of Wired’s Storyboard podcast. In 2007, Adam was a correspondent and writer for Wired Science, the nationally-broadcast science newsmagazine on PBS.

Before Wired, Adam spent eight years as a reporter for Newsweek, primarily focusing on science, technology, and medicine. While covering the emerging Internet revolution in the mid-1990s, he also carved out a geek culture beat—science fiction, comic books, and movies with lots of special effects. Adam worked on Newsweek’s presidential campaign book project in 1999 and 2000, following the campaigns of Bill Bradley, Al Gore, and Hillary Clinton. In 2002 and 2003 Adam was a Knight Science Journalism Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he studied the intersection of urban theory, ecology, and public health. A native of Los Angeles, Adam has a masters degree from the Boston University Graduate Program in Science Writing and an undergraduate degree from Pomona College in Claremont, California.

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Mitch Waldrop
Nature

M. Mitchell Waldrop is currently a features editor at Nature magazine. He earned a Ph.D. in elementary particle physics at the University of Wisconsin in 1975, and a Master's in journalism at Wisconsin in 1977. From 1977 to 1980 he was a writer and West Coast bureau chief for Chemical and Engineering News. From 1980 to 1991 he was a senior writer at Science magazine, where he covered physics, space, astronomy, computer science, artificial intelligence, molecular biology, psychology, and neuroscience. He was a freelance writer from 1991 to 2003 and from 2007 to 2008; in between he worked in media affairs for the National Science Foundation from 2003 to 2006. He is the author of Man-Made Minds (Walker, 1987), a book about artificial intelligence; Complexity (Simon & Schuster, 1992), a book about the Santa Fe Institute and the new sciences of complexity; and The Dream Machine (Viking, 2001), a book about the history of computing. In his spare time he is an avid cyclist. He lives in Washington, D.C., with his wife, Amy E. Friedlander.

Other key NASW personnel

Tinsley Davis, executive director
Organizer, NASW ScienceWriters annual meeting
P.O. Box 7905
Berkeley, CA 94707
Phone: (510) 647-9500

Lynne Friedmann, editor
ScienceWriters
P.O. Box 1725
Solana Beach, CA 92075
Phone: (858) 793-3537
Fax: (858) 345-3925

Russell Clemings, cybrarian
A'ndrea Elyse Messer, assistant cybrarian
National Association of Science Writers

The cybrarian is NASW's Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) agent.