Speakers

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  • Henry Scowcroft

    News & Multimedia Manager, Cancer Research UK

    Henry Scowcroft studied biochemistry at Oxford University before realizing that the laboratory life wasn’t for him, and got a job as a commissioning editor for a scientific journal. From there, he went on to do a Masters in Science Communication and, after a brief flirtation with science journalism, in 2003 he started working for Cancer Research UK, the UK’s largest fundraising charity. After a spell in the Digital and Science Communications departments, he currently manages a small team of multimedia content producers, creating content for the charity’s communications channels, including social media, and overseeing the charity’s news feed and blog. Scowcroft helped set up the CRUK Science blog in 2007. Now a recipient of several awards and a key feature of the UK science communications landscape, the blog is a central part of CRUK’s research communications strategy, and is widely read by patients, researchers and the general public.

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  • Per Sederberg

    Assistant professor of psychology; associate director, Center for Cognitive and Brain Sciences, The Ohio State University

    Per Sederberg grew up in South Carolina as a child of four university professors (two English, two political science). Though always a big fan of computer programming, he went to the University of Virginia expecting to be a physics and math major. Per soon became fascinated with the brain and mind, and he switched his major to cognitive science, where it seemed every class he wanted to take counted toward the major. After working in both cognitive and computational neuroscience labs as an undergrad, he took four years off to work as a software developer before returning to graduate school at Brandeis University and the University of Pennsylvania to earn a Ph.D. in neuroscience with a focus on electrophysiological and computational mechanisms of human memory. He went on to a postdoctoral fellowship at Princeton, where he studied machine-learning approaches to the analysis of neural data.In 2010 he joined the psychology faculty at Ohio State University, where he runs the OSU Computational Memory Lab.

    Per Sederberg will be conducting a small-scale memory study with volunteer meeting attendees. See details here.

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  • Matt Shipman

    Science writer & public information officer, North Carolina State University

    Matt Shipman is a science writer and public information officer at North Carolina State University. Shipman writes the Communication Breakdown blog for Scilogs.com, hosted by Spektrum and Nature Publishing Group, and has been an invited speaker and moderator on science communication issues at national and regional conferences, including meetings of the National Association of Science Writers and ScienceOnline Together (formerly ScienceOnline). He is currently writing a handbook for PIOs at research institutions, which will be published by University of Chicago Press. Prior to becoming a PIO, Shipman worked as a reporter in Washington, D.C., covering issues related to environment policy and public health.

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  • Nancy Shute

    Co-host of "Shots" Health Blog & Contributor, NPR

    Nancy Shute is an award-winning science journalist in print, digital and broadcast, and a lecturer and trainer in science writing and multimedia journalism. She is a past president of the National Association of Science Writers, the world’s largest science journalism organization.

    Nancy is co-host of NPR’s health blog, Shots, and also contributes news coverage and radio features to NPR’s All Things Considered and Morning Edition. She writes for national publications including National Geographic and Scientific American. While serving as assistant managing editor at U.S. News & World Report, she led the magazine’s coverage of science and technology. As a senior writer for U.S. News, she led group investigations and reporting projects, and authored dozens of cover stories.

    Shute trains journalists and scientists in the uses of social media and other new media technologies, and teaches science writing at Johns Hopkins University’s Advanced Academic Programs. She has been a science writer in residence at the University of Wisconsin, and guest lecturer at major universities, including Columbia, NYU, the University of Maryland, Georgetown, and the University of California-Santa Cruz.

    While president of NASW, Nancy led efforts to co-host the 2011 World Conference of Science Journalism in Doha, Qatar, where the majority of the 800 attendees came from the developing world. She also led NASW initiatives to strengthen ties with science writers in Latin America, and to increase multimedia training opportunities for NASW members.

    She lectures and leads training sessions at scientific and educational societies including the World Federation of Science Journalists, NASW, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Chemical Society, the American Psychological Association, and the National Academies of Science, Norge-Confex, the Inter-American National Academies of Science, the World Conference of Science Journalists, and Technion-Israel Institute of Technology.

    Her work has appeared in many other publications, including the New York Times, Washington Post, Smithsonian, New Republic, Harper’s, Outside, 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. As a Fulbright Scholar, she founded the first bilingual independent newspaper in Kamchatka, Russia. In 2010 she was a Knight Foundation fellow in entrepreneurial journalism.

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  • Tom Siegfried

    Freelance science journalist

    Tom Siegfried, former editor in chief of Science News, writes the Context blog at www.sciencenews.org. In addition to Science News, his work has appeared in Science, Nature, Astronomy, New Scientist and Smithsonian. Previously he was the science editor of the Dallas Morning News. He is the author of three books: The Bit and the Pendulum, Strange Matters and A Beautiful Math. Tom 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. His awards include the American Institute of Physics Science Communication Award, the American Geophysical Union’s Robert C. Cowen Award for Sustained Achievement in Science Journalism, the Science-in Society award from the National Association of Science Writers, the American Association for the Advancement of Science-Westinghouse Award, and the American Chemical Society’s James T. Grady-James H. Stack Award for Interpreting Chemistry for the Public. He is currently on the board of directors and serves as treasurer for the Council for the Advancement of Science Writing.

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  • Kevin Z. Smith

    Deputy director, Kiplinger Program in Public Affairs Journalism

    Kevin Z. Smith is the deputy director of the Kiplinger Program. He is a former science and medical writer and spent a lot of time covering NASA’s influence in West Virginia. Prior to joining Kiplinger, he worked for 13 years as a college professor teaching journalism at universities in Ohio, West Virginia and Virginia.

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  • Allison Snow

    Professor of evolution, ecology and organismal biology, The Ohio State University

    Allison Snow’s Plant Population Ecology Lab studies natural selection and ecological processes within plant populations, including the dynamics of gene flow, especially involving transgenic plants. Trained as a plant ecologist at the University of Massachusetts, Snow received postdoctoral fellowships from the National Science Foundation and the Smithsonian Institution. Her current research combines molecular and ecological approaches to understand how quickly crop genes move into wild populations, and the extent to which novel transgenic traits could benefit weedy and semi-weedy plants. She is the lead author of a 2005 Ecological Society of America position paper on environmental effects of genetically engineered organisms. A fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Aldo Leopold Leadership Program, she has served on the editorial boards of Ecology, Ecological Monographs, Evolution and Environmental Biosafety Research. A past president of the Botanical Society of America, she has served on the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Genetic Resources Advisory Board and panels convened to discuss issues in transgenic organisms by the National Research Council and the Academy of Finland. In 2002, she was one of Scientific American’s Top 50 Researchers in Science and Technology. She also directs the Undergraduate Research Office at Ohio State.

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  • Emily Sohn

    Freelance journalist

    Emily Sohn is a freelance journalist in Minneapolis who has written extensively for people of all ages and sizes. She got her start writing for kids as part of an expedition team that traveled around the world, webcasting to classrooms from places as remote as Cuba, Turkey, and the Peruvian Amazon. She was contributing writer for Science News for Kids (now Science News for Students) for the site's first five years and has written articles, educational materials, graphic novels and books for publications and publishers including the American Chemical Society, Pearson, Scholastic and Capstone Press. Grown-up publications include the Los Angeles Times, Nature, Science News, U.S. News & World Report, Health and Discovery News, where she spent more than five years as a contributor.  

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  • Mark D. Somerson

    Assistant Metro Editor, The Columbus Dispatch

    Mark D. Somerson is an Assistant Metro Editor at The Columbus Dispatch. He oversees coverage of medicine, the business of medicine, the environment, science, Columbus neighborhoods and transportation. He also is responsible for the weekly Science section, the weekly Insight section and the monthly health section, called Your Health.

    Before becoming an editor in 2000, Mark was a medical reporter at The Dispatch. He has worked at the newspaper since 1991.

    He is a 1989 graduate of the School of Journalism at Ohio State University. His first newspaper job was at The News-Herald in Willoughby, Ohio, where he also covered medicine.

    He is married, has two daughters and lives in Clintonville, a Columbus neighborhood.

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  • Anna Lee Strachan

    Freelance science producer

    Anna Lee Strachan is an Emmy-nominated freelance producer for PBS’s NOVA series.  She has produced and directed several hours for PBS’s NOVA including the critically-acclaimed The Fabric of the Cosmos, Making Stuff with David Pogue, and NOVA scienceNOW.  As an associate producer she helped produce the Peabody Award-winning two-hour special, Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on Trial.  Prior to her television work, she wrote for NASA’s Ask an Astrobiologist website and produced for NPR’s Talk of the Nation: Science Friday.  She has a degree in cognitive neuroscience from Harvard University and an M.S. in science writing from MIT.

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  • Eliza Strickland

    Associate editor, IEEE Spectrum

    Eliza Strickland is an associate editor for the international technology magazine IEEE Spectrum. Assigned the impossible beat of covering technology developments across all of Asia, she has made frequent trips abroad to report on a variety of stories. Most notably, Strickland produced a 20-page special report on the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster and its impact on energy policy, which helped IEEE Spectrum win a 2012 National Magazine Award for general excellence. In 2013 she received an Abe Fellowship for Journalists from the Social Science Research Council, and spent six weeks in Japan reporting on the fallout from the Fukushima crisis.

    For her secondary beat of biomedical engineering, Strickland covers the technologies enabling personalized medicine, such as mobile health tools, genome sequencing machines, and the implantable devices that will eventually turn us all into happy cyborgs. Her current passion is reporting on the neuro-modulation techniques that researchers are using to tweak patients’ movements, moods, and memories.

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  • Nidhi Subbaraman

    Staff writer, The Boston Globe's BetaBoston

    Nidhi Subbaraman covers science and technology as a staff writer for BetaBoston, The Boston Globe's innovation channel. Before that, she reported news and features for the science/tech desk at NBC News Digital. Subbaraman has also been a contributing writer at Fast Company and MIT Technology Review. Her freelance work has appeared at Sfari.org, New Scientist, Nature News, Scientific American and others. She has a bachelor's degree in biochemistry and a degree in science writing from MIT.

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  • Lonnie Thompson

    Distinguished University Professor; senior research scientist, Byrd Polar Research Center, The Ohio State University

    Lonnie Thompson is one of the world’s foremost authorities on paleoclimatology and glaciology. He has led 60 expeditions during the last 40 years, conducting ice-core drilling programs in the Polar Regions as well as on tropical and subtropical ice fields in 16 countries including China, Peru, Russia, Tanzania, and Papua, Indonesia (New Guinea). Thompson and his team were the first to developed lightweight solar-powered drilling equipment for the acquisition of histories from ice fields in the high Andes of Peru and on Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania. The results from these ice-core-derived climate histories, published in more than 230 articles, have contributed greatly toward improved understanding of Earth’s climate system, both past and present. Thompson is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and in 2007 was awarded the National Medal of Science. In 2013 he was awarded the International Science and Technology Cooperation Award of the People’s Republic of China by the President of China, the highest honor given to a foreign scientist.

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  • Paul Tullis

    Features editor, TakePart.com; contributing writer, The New York Times Magazine

    Paul Tullis is Features Editor at TakePart.com and a Contributing Writer for The New York Times Magazine. He's also written for Bloomberg Businessweek, Time, Slate, and more than 50 other print, broadcast, and digital media outlets. As an editor he has twice been part of teams that earned nominations for General Excellence at the National Magazine Awards.

  • Paul Tullis

    Features editor at TakePart.com; contributing editor at the New York Times Magazine.

    Paul Tullis is Features Editor at TakePart.com and a Contributing Writer for The New York Times Magazine. He's also written for Bloomberg Businessweek, Time, Slate, and more than 50 other print, broadcast, and digital media outlets. As an editor he has twice been part of teams that earned nominations for General Excellence at the National Magazine Awards.

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