Position/Organization: professor, Annenberg School of Journalism, University of Southern California

K.C. Cole, a long-time science writer for the Los Angeles Times, is currently a professor at USC’s Annenberg School of Journalism. Cole’s writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Smithsonian, The Columbia Journalism Review, Newsweek, Esquire, Ms., The Washington Post and many other publications; her work was featured in The Best American Science Writing 2004 and 2005, and The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2002. Described by Amazon.com as “the Leonardo da Vinci of science writing,” she is the author of eight nonfiction books, most recently, Something Incredibly Wonderful Happens: Frank Oppenheimer and the World He Made Up—a memoir/biography of her late mentor, the self-proclaimed “uncle” of the atomic bomb and founder of San Francisco’s world-renowned “museum of awareness,” the Exploratorium. Her other books include The Universe and the Teacup: The Mathematics of Truth and Beauty—a national best-seller translated into a dozen languages—Mind Over Matter: Conversations with the Cosmos, based on her LA Times columns, The Hole in the Universe and First You Build a Cloud.
Among her most treasured awards are the American Institute of Physics prize for science writing, the Los Angeles Times award for Explanatory Journalism, the Edward R. Murrow Award for “thoughtful coverage of scientific controversies” from the Skeptics Society, and the Exploratorium’s public understanding of science award, presented by Frank Oppenheimer the year before his death.
Cole likes to play with the natural connections between science, art, politics, whatnot, and hosts an irregular series of events exploring these intersections at Santa Monica Art Studios known as Categorically Not!