Speakers

Speakers

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NASW workshop
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CASW New Horizons in Science
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Lunch with a scientist

  • WK
    Amanda Paulson

    Science and environment reporter, Christian Science Monitor, Boulder, Colo.

    Amanda Paulson lives in Boulder, Colo., and has been a staff writer for the Monitor since 2000, writing for national news and covering the Midwest and, since 2011, the Rocky Mountain region. She has reported on education reform, immigration, agriculture, and natural disasters, including Hurricane Katrina, the Boulder floods, wildfires, and the Sago Mine disaster. Since 2016, she has covered the environment for the Monitor, on topics ranging from climate change and public lands to oceans and rainforests. She recently spent a year as a fellow at the Scripps Center for Environmental Journalism in Boulder.

    Speaking:

  • WK
    Kendra Pierre-Louis

    Reporter, New York Times climate team, New York, N.Y.

    Kendra Pierre-Louis is a reporter with the New York Times on the climate desk. There she reports on climate science and the social impacts of climate change. Before joining the Times, Kendra was a staff writer for Popular Science (PopSci) where she wrote about science, the environment, and, sometimes, mayonnaise. Kendra is also the author of the book, "Green Washed: Why We Can't Buy Our Way to a Green Planet." Kendra has an S.M (M.S) in science writing from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), an M.A. in sustainable development with a focus on policy analysis and advocacy from the SIT Graduate Institute, and a B.A. in economics from Cornell University.

    Twitter: @KendraWrites
    Email: kendra@kendrawrites.com

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  • WK
    Iqbal Pittalwala

    Senior public information officer, University of California, Riverside, Riverside, Calif.

    Iqbal Pittalwala is a senior public information officer at the University of California, Riverside, where he covers the School of Medicine that was launched in 2013. He also covers a handful of departments in the College of Natural and Agricultural Sciences. He worked for a few years at UC Irvine, too, where he covered science. He enjoys writing about science, health, and medicine; he writes fiction in his dwindling spare time. Born in Mumbai, India, he came to the United States in the mid-1980s. He has a Ph.D. in atmospheric sciences from Stony Brook University, New York, and a master of fine arts in creative writing from the University of Iowa.

    Email: iqbal@ucr.edu

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  • WK
    Sandeep Ravindran

    Freelance science writer, Bethesda, Md.

    Sandeep Ravindran is a freelance science journalist based in Bethesda, Md. He covers life sciences and technology, and has written for a variety of publications including The Scientist, Nature, PBS Nova Next, Smithsonian, National Geographic News, and Wired.

    Twitter: @sandeeprtweets
    Email: sandeep2208@gmail.com

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  • NH
    Andrew Read

    Director, Huck Institutes of the Life Sciences; Evan Pugh University Professor of biology and entomology; Eberly Professor in biotechnology, Penn State University

    Andrew Read's research group investigates drug and insecticide resistance as well as the evolution of virulence, infectiousness, and vaccine escape. He is particularly interested in the question of how best to treat patients so as to minimize resistance evolution. Originally from New Zealand, Read did a D. Phil. in evolutionary biology at the University of Oxford. He held various fellowships at Oxford and then at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, before becoming chair of natural history there, a professorship established in 1767. He has taught ecology, evolution, microbiology, and statistics. He has authored more than 250 peer-reviewed publications, 30 book chapters and four edited volumes, and been elected to fellowships from the Royal Society of Edinburgh; the Institute of Advanced Studies, Berlin; the AAAS; the American Academy of Microbiology; the Royal Society; and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He also worked as a science journalist for several weeks in 2003 as a British Science Association Media Fellow, writing for the Irish Times in Dublin (http://www.thereadgroup.net/wp-content/uploads/AndrewRead.pdf). In 2007, he moved to the Center for Infectious Disease Dynamics at Penn State.

    Web: https://www.thereadgroup.net

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  • NH
    Antonio Regalado

    Biomedicine editor, MIT Technology Review

    Antonio Regalado looks for stories about how technology is changing medicine and biomedical research. Before joining MIT Technology Review in July 2011, he lived in São Paulo, Brazil, where he wrote about science, technology, and politics in Latin America for Science and other publications. He was the science reporter at the Wall Street Journal from 2000 to 2009 and later a foreign correspondent.

    Twitter: @antonioregalado

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  • WK
    Czerne Reid

    Lecturer & program director, University of Florida, Gainesville, Fla.

    Czerne Reid is a lecturer and program director in the University of Florida (UF) College of Medicine Department of Psychiatry, and an affiliate faculty member in the UF College of Journalism and Communications. She is also a freelance science writer, and her work has most recently appeared in National Geographic. Czerne earned a Ph.D. in environmental chemistry at Emory University, and a graduate certificate in science communication at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her bachelor's degree in chemistry is from the University of the West Indies, Mona, in her native Jamaica. She has worked as a science writer and reporter at various outlets, including The (Columbia, South Carolina) State newspaper, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, the Salinas Californian, Stanford News Service, Stanford School of Medicine Office of Communication and Public Affairs, and UF Health Communications. Honors include an Exemplary Teacher Award from the UF College of Medicine, an Educational Innovator Award from the UF health educational scholarship program, and awards from the South Carolina Press Association and the South Carolina Medical Association. She was named a 2018 Entrepreneurship Faculty Fellow of the UF Warrington College of Business and a 2007 Kaiser Media Fellow. She serves as education committee co-chair for the National Association of Science Writers, coordinating a stable of career development programs for students, and served as co-chair of the Regional Committee on Latin America and the Caribbean of the World Conference of Science Journalists 2017.

    Twitter: @CzerneReid
    Email: czreid@nasw.org

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  • WK
    Michael Reilly

    Executive editor, MIT Technology Review

    I'm the executive editor for MIT Technology Review. I think it's fair to say I've been a science writer since the first news brief I was commissioned to write for Nature … back in 2005. Since then, I've spent time at Wired and the Discovery Channel, freelanced, and even dabbled in a media startup (it went under). I also served two tours at New Scientist, first as a writer in the San Francisco bureau, then as Boston bureau chief. I've called Technology Review home since 2016, where I've edited and written about (but mostly edited) everything from cancer immunology to 3D printed rockets. I also create and help create new products — newsletters, podcasts, events, that sort of thing. In 2018 I was a Sulzberger fellow at the Columbia Journalism School, where I learned that there might just be a sustainable business model for journalism.
     
    Pitching guidelines:
     
    As our mission statement says, our aim is "to bring about better-informed and more conscious decisions about technology through authoritative, influential, and trustworthy journalism." Technology affects nearly every corner of modern life, so we have a big job. That means we need freelancers, and we commission a wide variety of stories from established (and sometimes quite famous) writers as well as new, up-and-coming voices. We are also keenly aware that the tech world is too often represented by rich, white, male figures. This is something we feel strongly about working to correct, both in the subjects we cover and the writers we employ.

    Stories can range from a few hundred words to full-length magazine features several thousand words in length. We more often commission freelance pieces that skew toward the longer, more in-depth end of things — which often end up in one of our six print issues each year — but we publish daily online and we pay the same rate for a story, no matter the medium. Pitches should be about technology in some respect, but forget the idea of a traditional "researchers discovered X" story (though new research is often a good starting point). We're looking for great characters, tension, and narrative that will compel readers as well as leave them better informed.

    Twitter: @reillymj
    Email: reilly@technologyreview.com

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  • WK
    Anthony Robinson

    Associate professor of geography, Penn State, State College, Pa.

    Anthony Robinson is director of online geospatial education programs at Penn State and leads the school's online postbaccalaureate GIS certificate and master of geographic information systems programs in the John A. Dutton e-Education Institute. He is the past-president of the North American Cartographic Information Society (NACIS), and chair of the International Cartographic Association (ICA) Commission on Visual Analytics. He teaches a Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) on Coursera and Futurelearn called Maps and the Geospatial Revolution, which has drawn over 125,000 students from 200 countries to date.

    Robinson's research focuses broadly on designing and evaluating geovisualization tools to improve geographic information utility and usability. He's done work in epidemiology, crisis management, national security, and higher education domains. His research efforts have involved studying the use of visualization tools using eye-tracking, exploring issues related to map symbol standardization in the context of emergency management, and analyzing the design elements of viral maps.

    Twitter: @A_C_Robinson
    Email: arobinson@psu.edu

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  • WK
    Dean Robinson

    Story editor, New York Times magazine, New York, N.Y.

    Dean Robinson has been a story editor at the New York Times magazine since 2000. Prior to that, he worked at a personal finance magazine as a reporter and then features editor, following some stints as a freelance fact checker and magazine intern. His favorite place he's sent a writer to: The Marshall Islands, in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, to tell a story about wave piloting.

    Email: drobin@nytimes.com

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  • NH
    Angela Saini

    Science journalist

    Angela Saini is an award-winning British science journalist and broadcaster. She regularly presents science programs on the BBC, and her writing has appeared in New Scientist, the Guardian, the Sunday Times, and Wired. Her latest book is Superior: The Return of Race Science. Her previous book, Inferior: How Science Got Women Wrong, was published in 2017 to widespread critical acclaim and has been translated into 11 languages. Saini has a master's in engineering from the University of Oxford and was a Knight Science Journalism Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

    Twitter: @AngelaDSaini
    Web: http://angelasaini.co.uk

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  • LS
    Steven Schiff

    Penn State

    Steven Schiff, Director of the Penn State Center for Neural Engineering, Brush Chair professor of engineering; professor of neurosurgery, engineering science and mechanics, and physics at Penn State, has a paradigm-shattering vision: to move from reactive, delayed laboratory diagnoses to real-time treatment optimization using predictive models that incorporate historical microbiological surveillance data, geographic location of the patient, and environmental and climatic factors to determine the likely pathogens and narrow down the best treatment choices at the point of care. Predictive strategies have never been used in treatment of individual patients in this way, but Schiff believes his approach to predictive personalized public health has the potential to substantially improve patient outcomes.

    Speaking:

  • WK
    Sarah Scoles

    Freelance journalist, Denver, Colo.

    Sarah Scoles is a freelance science journalist based in Denver. She is a contributing editor at Popular Science, a contributing writer at Wired, and the author of the book "Making Contact."

    Twitter: @ScolesSarah
    Email: sarah.scoles@gmail.com

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  • NH
    Leah Shaffer

    Freelance writer

    Leah Shaffer is a science writer based in St. Louis whose stories have appeared in publications such as Wired, the Atlantic, Discover, NOVANext and Undark. She writes about biology, medicine, and the weird critters inside and outside the human body.

    Twitter: @leahabshaffer
    Web: https://leahabshaffer.wordpress.com

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  • WK
    Knvul Sheikh

    Reporting fellow, New York Times

    Knvul Sheikh is a reporting fellow with the New York Times. She writes about robots, biology, and agricultural technology for the paper’s science desk. She also earned the 2019 Open Notebook/Burroughs Wellcome Fund early career fellowship and wrote articles on how to hone science journalism skills. Prior to that, Knvul freelanced for several publications and indulged her wanderlust as often as possible.

    Twitter: @KnvulS
    Email: knvuls@gmail.com

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