OUR GANG

by Rick Borchelt

Three years and 250 features, columns, and articles later, John Makulowich moves his information technology pen from the Washington Post's Washington Technology biweekly to USA Today.com, where he's now doing the popular online column about future trends in IT, "The Ledge." Between gigs, he taught a distance-learning course on effective presentations at George Washington University and spends his spare time working on a course for communications professionals, "How to Produce a Successful PR Strategy and Implementation Plan."

Peripatetic Pulitzer Winner Jon Franklin has taken more than a decade of peregrination to do it, but he's returning to the University of Maryland College of Journalism to become the Merrill Chair in Journalism. The Maryland grad, who comes to the campus from a science-writing post at the Raleigh News and Observer, will begin teaching this summer. The college announced that with Franklin's hire it hopes to begin building a center for science and technology communication at the College Park campus.

Another Beltway switch saw Brian Vastag moving from the National Cancer Institute to the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Kelli Miller reminds us that in addition to working at NewsProNet Interactive, mentioned in this column in a previous issue, she's also an active freelancer under her own business moniker, NewScience, Inc. Clients include CBSHealthwatch.com, In Touch magazine, American Way magazine, and others.

The journal Academic Physician and Scientist has a new editor in Claudia M. Caruana, who left the freelance fold to join the ranks of magazine writers.

Baltimore freelance Lynn Lamberg's book The Body Clock Guide to Better Health: How to Use Your Body's Natural Clock to Fight Illness and Achieve Maximum Health, got the nod from the health editor at Amazon.com as one of the Ten Best Books of the Year. The book by Lynn and her coauthor, University of Texas chronobiologist Michel Smolensky, also got good buzz recently from the Ladies Home Journal and will be published in Braille this year by the Library of Congress.

Aussie member Wilson da Silva has won the 2000 Australian Film Institute Award for Best Documentary, Australia's highest film honor, for The Diplomat, which he wrote and produced. The film about East Timor's struggles for independence premiered at the 2000 Sydney Film Festival and has made the rounds of film festivals in Vancouver, Ireland, Hawaii, South Africa, and London, and lucky NASW members may have caught it at the recent San Francisco Human Rights Watch International Film Festival.

Two books by members made the list of nominees for the 2001 National Book Critics Circle Award. Laurie Garrett's Betrayal of Trust: The Collapse of Global Public Health was nominated in the category of general nonfiction and Robin Marantz Henig's The Monk in the Garden: The Lost and Found Genius of Gregor Mendel was a pick in biography/autobiography.

Peggy Girshman couldn't get enough of helping out during National Public Radio pledge drives, so she's returning to NPR from her sojourn in the world of commercial broadcast at NBC. And as Peggy points out, this means NASW only had to eke out an existence of two weeks without someone from NPR on the board.

Kenneth Green just landed a contract from Enslow publishers to write a junior-high-level book about global warming. Kenneth also wrote two chapters on climate change and air pollution for the new MacMillan Encyclopedia of Energy and pens a new weekly column on the Tech Central Station "New Environmentalism" Web portal.

Kelly Barry Stelljes, a public affairs specialist for USDA's Agricultural Research Service, received the research agency's 2000 Excellence in Information award for her work covering research on western agricultural and environmental topics. The award is given for outstanding contributions toward increasing external awareness of the public benefits from ARS research. Kelly's citation is for "sustained creativity in delivering ARS research news to the public and media gatekeepers."

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Rick Borchelt is outreach strategist in the Office of Science at the US Department of Energy. Send hot NASW-related gossip to Rick at rborchelt@nasw.org, or phone him at 202-586-6702.