Felecia Davis is the director of SOFTLAB@PSU. Her work in design explores the role of communication to people through computational textiles or e-textiles, textiles that can sense and respond to the environment with embedded electronics and sensors. Davis has lectured, taught workshops, published, and exhibited her work in textiles, computation, and architecture internationally, including the Swedish School of Textiles, Microsoft Research, and the MIT Media Lab. Davis has taught architectural design for more than 10 years at Cornell University, and design studios, most recently at Princeton University and the Cooper Union in New York. Principal in her own design firm, FELECIADAVISTUDIO, she has received several finalist awards for her architectural designs in open and invited design competitions such as the California Valley Central History Museum, the Queens Museum of Art Addition and the Pittsburgh Charm Bracelet Neighborhood Revitalization Competition, and the Little Haiti Housing Association in Miami. Davis earned a Ph.D. from the Design and Computation Group in the School of Architecture and Planning at MIT. She received her M. Arch. from Princeton and her B.S. in engineering from Tufts University. While at MIT, she designed computational textiles — textiles that respond to commands through computer programming, electronics, and sensors for use in architecture. Such responsive textiles, used in lightweight shelters, will transform how we communicate, socialize, and use space.

Twitter: @fadamit
Web: https://stuckeman.psu.edu/faculty/felecia-davis

Hana El-Samad's research group emphasizes the role of control theory and dynamical systems in the study of biological networks. Her group works at the interface of systems and synthetic biology, focusing on the architecture, roles, principles, and evolution of feedback loops in biological circuits. A major current focus is to develop rationally designed, programmable, plug-and-play, cellular recognizance and repair circuits that can be broadly deployed for therapies and biotechnological applications. El-Samad is a 2009 Packard Fellow and recipient of many honors, including the 2011 Donald P. Eckman Award and the 2012 CSB2 prize in systems biology. She was also named a Paul G. Allen Distinguished Investigator in 2013 and senior investigator of the Chan-Zuckerberg Biohub in 2017. El-Samad joined UCSF after obtaining a doctorate degree in mechanical engineering from the University of California, Santa Barbara, preceded by a master's degree in electrical engineering from the Iowa State University.

Twitter: @HanaScientist
Web: http://elsamadlab.ucsf.edu

Kat Eschner is a freelance journalist and contributing editor at Popular Science. She writes a weekly newsletter about animal-human relationships called "Creature Feature."

Twitter: @KatEschner
Email: kat.eschner@gmail.com
Web: https://goforcreaturefeature.com

Susana Ferreira is a Portuguese-Canadian freelance reporter, producer, and writer for magazines and film. She spent four years based in Port-au-Prince, Haiti as a correspondent for Reuters and stringer for Time, CBC, PRI, and other outlets. She won the inaugural Matthew Power Literary Reporting Award, administered by NYU, for a long-form story about drug decriminalization in Portugal. She has filed breaking news and deeply-reported literary nonfiction from throughout the world for
the Believer, Columbia Journalism Review, Foreign Policy, the Guardian, and the Wall Street Journal. She speaks five languages — six, if you count "Toronto English."

Gregory Friberg received his A.B. degree in biochemistry from Middlebury College and M.D. from New York Medical College. He completed his residency training in Internal Medicine at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center and his fellowship training in Hematology and Oncology at The University of Chicago Hospitals. As part of his training, he graduated from the University of Chicago Health Sciences Department Clinical Research Training Program specializing in clinical trial design and analysis. He joined the faculty of the University of Chicago thereafter joining the Phase I, Gastrointestinal, and Gynecologic oncology teams where he served as the PI for multiple early phase clinical studies. He published multiple research papers and reviews, and he was an active member of ASCO, the CALGB, and the GOG.

Friberg joined Amgen in 2006 as an Associate Medical Director in Oncology Early Development. He served as the team lead for multiple early and mid-stage programs, shepherding molecules though IND filings, into initial human studies, and onto later development. Friberg took over as group leader in 2011 and served for 3 years as Therapeutic Area Head, Oncology Early Development and later for 4 months as Early Development Head overseeing (Oncology, Inflammation, Neuroscience, and General Medicine/Bone). Starting in 2014, Greg served as the interim co-TA head for the Hematology / Oncology TA. In 2016 he served as the Global Product General Manager (GPGM) for the early hematology BiTE portfolio.

In 2017 Friberg assumed the role of vice president and Therapeutic Area Head, Hematology / Oncology Global Development. In addition, in 2019 Greg assumed the TA Head responsibilities for the Bone franchise.

Gisele Grayson is a deputy editor on NPR's science desk. She edits stories about climate change, the environment, space, as well as basic research in biology, physics, evolution, geology and paleontology. From 2011 to 2018, she edited health policy.  She ran the NPR side of a collaboration with Kaiser Health News, a nonprofit news service focused on health care policy and politics. The collaboration includes more than 30 reporters from public radio stations across the country and provided extensive coverage of both the Affordable Care Act and all the efforts to change the health law.

Grayson started her NPR career in June 2001. She contributed to NPR's coverage of the Sept. 11 attacks and the anthrax attacks later that fall. She traveled with reporters and worked on stories that ranged from the tsunami in Indonesia to black lung in West Virginia, and from dinosaurs to the Y chromosome. Grayson also spent a month in Mississippi working on stories about the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. In 2008, she traveled around the country with Linda Wertheimer talking to voters. She has worked on "All Things Considered," produced election night coverage in 2010, and won a national health care reporting award for producing a story on osteopenia with reporter Alix Spiegel.
 
Before working at NPR, Grayson worked for various law firms in Washington, D.C., and New York, and planned meetings for business executives at the Conference Board in New York. Grayson graduated from Wesleyan University and has a master's degree in international affairs from Columbia University.

Email: GGrayson@npr.org

Lila Guterman is a deputy news editor at Science, where she focuses on biology, chemistry, and clinical research. She has been a science writer and editor for more than 20 years and has degrees in chemistry from Harvard University and the California Institute of Technology. She is also a graduate of the science writing program at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Before coming to Science, Lila worked on staff at the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute, Science News, Chemical & Engineering News, and the Chronicle of Higher Education. She has written for publications including Nature, Cell, New Scientist, the Washington Post, and the Economist.

Lila has won national awards for her writing, including the 2002 Evert Clark/Seth Payne Award for young science writers, the 2003 Media Award of the American Society of Anesthesiologists, and third place in the Society for Environmental Journalists' 2003 Awards for Reporting on the Environment. She was also a finalist in 2005 for a Livingston Award for Young Journalists. Lila was a Knight Science Journalism Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2006.

Pitching guidelines:

Are you a freelance journalist with a hot scoop or juicy scandal, a compelling profile of a scientist, or an original take on a science policy issue? If so, bring it to the award-winning news department of Science, the flagship research journal from the world's largest general science society. We're eager to break news and tell stories that no other science journalist has found.

Here are some things you should know before pitching a story to us. The editors and writers of the news department are professional journalists and produce much of our news content. But we have plenty of appetite for freelance contributions — everything from 140-word news briefs to 2500-word features to investigative projects. About half of our online-only stories and a quarter of the stories in the weekly print issue are either assigned to freelancers we like working with or are pitched by freelancers.

Because we receive all the big press releases and embargoed information from major journals (Science, Nature, PNAS, etc.), you will have very little luck successfully pitching a study from these. Our biggest piece of advice for selling us on a straight research story is this: Pitch us hidden gems.

Note that we don't take stories from academic researchers, company representatives, or public information officers wishing to promote their institutions. Freelance writers should also disclose any potential conflicts of interest when they pitch a story, whether it be a personal relationship with the subject or key source of a story or previous work for the institution that would be written about. If you currently pen press releases for a university, we won't let you write about them, but if you did a feature for a school magazine a year ago and nothing since, we likely will. Just be transparent with us.

Science covers news in all areas of science, from geology to genetics, as well as science policy and issues important to the scientific community, such as science, technology, engineering, and math education and sexual harassment. In print we publish news briefs, longer news analysis and trends stories, and features. Online, where we publish multiple daily stories, we focus on breaking news, though we are also interested in enterprise stories — that is, stories not tied to press releases, such as explainers on trending news and Q&As with interesting researchers.

For most stories pay is per word, with rate depending on experience. For certain types of stories, such as Q&As, we pay a flat rate negotiated in advance.

How to pitch

• If you come across news, don’t wait to pitch it. We want to publish as soon as possible after the event. For embargoed studies, please pitch us at least 3 days in advance, so that we can OK the proposal and you can deliver a story a day or two before the embargo lifts.
• If you are pitching a news story about a research study, write a few sentences about what the study is about and why it’s a big deal. Include the press release and paper when possible.
• If you’re pitching a longer story, such as a feature, make sure your pitch also gives a sense of how you will tell it. What is its scope, will it focus on certain characters or places, what is the storyline? But keep the pitch tight, three or four paragraphs at most.
• If you’re new to us, please send us published clips — no more than three or four — so we can judge your writing.
• If you are not pitching embargoed news, please check Google News to see whether any other outlets have covered the story.
• Note any video and audio possibilities in your pitch.
• Put “Pitch” in your subject line. Otherwise your email may be flagged as spam or ignored as a press release.
• Please, please, spend some time reading Science’s news site before pitching us. You’ll see that our stories, even those about medicine or business, all have some connection to basic research. You’ll also see that although we write for people with a keen interest in science, we are not aimed at the specialists. Our goal is to entice scientists and science enthusiasts to read broadly, and even for fun. The more original and interesting a proposal is, the more likely we are to take it.

Twitter: @lilaguterman
Email: lguterman@aaas.org