CASW Profiles

Deborah Blum is a Pulitzer-Prize winning science writer and professor of journalism at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is the author of several books, most recently Ghost Hunters: William James and the Scientific Search for Life After Death, and a co-editor of A Field Guide for Science Writers. She is a past-president of the National Association of Science Writers and, in addition to serving on the CASW board, is a member of the Board on Life Sciences of the National Academy of Sciences and the program committee of the World Federation of Science Journalists.

Philip M. Boffey is an editorial writer at The New York Times. He formerly served as a reporter, science and health editor and deputy editorial page editor.Boffey was a member of two reporting teams that won Pulitzer Prizes: the first in 1986 for a series on the "Star Wars" missile defense system, the second in 1987 for coverage of the Challenger space shuttle disaster. He has been president of the National Association of Science Writers. Boffey is the author of The Brain Bank of America, an investigation of the National Academy of Sciences, published in 1975. Born in East Orange, N.J., Boffey received an A.B. degree, magna cum laude, in history, from Harvard College in 1958.

Alan Boyle, as MSNBC.com's science editor, runs a virtual curiosity shop of the physical sciences, space exploration and more. He came to MSNBC.com on its first day of operation in 1996, after stints at daily newspapers in Cincinnati, Spokane and Seattle. Since then, Boyle has won awards from the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the National Association of Science Writers, the Pirelli Relativity Challenge and the CMU Cybersecurity Journalism Awards program. He is a contributor to A Field Guide for Science Writers, the blogger behind MSNBC's Cosmic Log -- and an occasional talking head on the MSNBC cable channel.

Lewis Cope was a science writer for the Minneapolis Star Tribune for 29 years, and is now a freelance writer. He is a former president of the National Association of Science Writers. He is coauthor of the second edition of News & Numbers: A Guide to Reporting Statistical Claims and Controversies in Health and Other Fields. It is used as a college journalism textbook, as well as a resource by writers. Cope has received national awards from the American Cancer Society, the American Heart Association, the American Association for the Advancement of Science and other organizations. He is a graduate of Washington & Lee University, Lexington, Va., and spent a year as a science-writing fellow at Columbia University 's Graduate School of Journalism, New York City. He also is a former president of the Minnesota Society of Professional Journalists.

Barbara J. Culliton has had extensive experience as a journalist and editor in biomedical research and policy. She was founding editor in chief of the Genome News Network, an online news magazine published initially by Celera Genomics in 1999. Ms. Culliton spent 18 years as a reporter and news editor at Science, and then became Deputy Editor of Nature in 1991, where she launched Nature Genetics, Nature Structural Biology, and Nature Medicine. From 1990-1998 she was also Times Mirror Visiting Professor of science writing at Johns Hopkins University. She is currently chair of the National Academies Communication Awards jury, which gives $20,000 prizes for excellence in science writing. Culliton was elected to the Institute of Medicine at the Academies in 1989. She is a former president of CASW, as well as a former president of the National Association of Science Writers.

Arthur Fisher was science and technology editor of Popular Science magazine from 1969 to his retirement as executive editor in 1996. Fisher's articles on a wide range of technical and scientific topics have garnered him major writing awards from, among others, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Institute of Physics and the American Chemical Society. He is co-author of two books on technology and inventions, "Century of Wonders" and "Fire of Genius", both published by Doubleday. He is the author of "The Healthy Heart", the first volume in a Time-Life series on family health that won the 1981 Blakeslee Award of the American Heart Association for distinguished science writing. Fisher is also a much-published photographer whose work has been exhibited at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden and Nikon House. After his official retirement, Fisher continued to contribute to Popular Science as well as to a number of other publications, including Natural History and Encore, a Wall Street Journal publication for those over age 50.

Warren Leary is a science correspondent for The New York Times based in Washington, D.C. A science writer for more than 30 years, he is a graduate of the University of Nebraska and received an M.S. degree from the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University. Leary began his science writing career with the Associated Press, creating the science beat in the Boston bureau of the news agency from 1971 through 1976, and continuing as a senior science writer for the AP in its Washington bureau from 1976 until 1989, when he joined the staff of The Times. As an award-winning science writer based in Washington, Leary covers space flight, technology, engineering, aeronautics, and medical science, as well as policy issues. He is a member and former officer of the National Association of Sciences Writers.

Leon M. Lederman, internationally renowned specialist in high-energy physics, is director emeritus of Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois. Lederman is a past President of AAAS and a member of the National Academy of Sciences. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics (1988). He is now the Pritzker Professor of Science at IIT and Resident Scholar at the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy IMSA). In recent years he has maintained a vigorous program in Science Education ranging from the founding of a residential public school for the gifted, to professional development of primary school teachers, to drastic reform of U.S. school science programs.

Diane McGurgan began her professional career in 1961 as a member of the public relations staff of the American Institute of Physics. In 1978, she was appointed administrative secretary of the National Association of Science Writers; in 1999, in appreciation of her dedication, sensitivity and responsiveness, she was named to her current position as executive director of NASW overseeing a membership roster that now exceeds 2,400. In 1987, she was invited to become administrative secretary of CASW. Given her dual role with the two complementary organizations, McGurgan has been described by many as the heart and the glue that binds the science writing community.

Ben Patrusky, executive director of CASW since 1988, served for three decades (1975 -- 2004) as program director of the annual New Horizons in Science briefing. Before embarking on a freelance science career in 1975, he was for a dozen years the research writer and science editor for the American Heart Association, where he designed and launched AHA's Science Writers Forum. He has also orchestrated science journalism seminars for, among others, the National Academy of Science, Research to Prevent Blindness and the Ford Foundation. Widely published, he is the recipient of the Science Journalism Award from the American Institute of Physics and the American Chemical Society's Grady-Stack Award. He is an honorary member of Sigma Xi, the scientific research society, and and for 18 years until 2008, served as a member of the board of trustees of Science Service (now the Society for Science and the People), publisher of Science News and administrator of the Intel Science Talent Search.

David Perlman, award-winning Science Editor of the San Francisco Chronicle, has been a reporter, magazine writer, and foreign correspondent, and has been reporting on science and technology for more than 40 years. He is a past president of CASW and the National Association of Science Writers. He has been a Poynter Fellow at Yale, a Carnegie Corporation Fellow at Stanford, and a Regent's Professor at the University of California. He lectures widely at American universities and has led science writing and editing workshops for the American Press Institute and the China Association for Science and Technology.

Charles Petit is a freelance science writer, a contributing editor for U.S News & World Report, and is the head tracker -- gathering and commenting on the day's science news -- for the Knight Science Journalism Tracker website funded by the Knight Science Journalism Fellowships at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He started in 1970 at the Livermore Herald & News, moving to the San Francisco Chronicle in 1972 and to U.S. News in 1998. Professional recognition includes writing awards from the American Association for the Advancement of Science (once for newspapers, once for magazines) and from the National Association of Science Writers, American Institute of Physics, American Geophysical Union, and American Heart Association. He is a former president of both the National Association of Science Writers and the Northern California Science Writers Association, has been an instructor at the Graduate School of Journalism at UC Berkeley, and has a degree in astronomy from UC Berkeley.

Paul Raeburn is the author of Acquainted with the Night, a memoir of raising children with depression and bipolar disorder. He is a former senior editor at Business Week and science editor at The Associated Press. He is also a past president of the National Association of Science Writers and a recipient of its Science-in-Society Award. His other awards include the Associated Press Managing Editors Award for excellence, two Deadline Club awards, two Computer Press Association awards, and the John P. McGovern Award for Excellence in Medical Communications from the American Medical Writers Association. He is an honorary member of Sigma Xi, the scientific research society. Raeburn was on the CASW board for more than a dozen years before leaving to become CASW's New Horizons Program Director.

 

Rosalind Reid has been editor of American Scientist, the interdisciplinary magazine of Sigma Xi, The Scientific Research Society, since 1992. An advocate for improving the visual communication of complex scientific ideas, she is a co-organizer of the MIT/Harvard-sponsored Image and Meaning workshop series for scientists, artists and science communicators. She was the first Journalist in Residence at the Kavli Institute of Theoretical Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and has taken a second "science immersion" leave from American Scientist to serve as a Fellow at the Harvard Initiative in Innovative Computing during the 2007-08 academic year. Reid covered government for newspapers in Maine and North Carolina before learning the science beat as a research news editor at North Carolina State University. She is an honorary member of Sigma Xi.

Joann Ellison Rodgers, a graduate of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, was national science correspondent and columnist for the Hearst Newspapers and winner of a Lasker Award for medical journalism before joining Johns Hopkins Medicine, where she now is Executive Director of Communications and Public Affairs. Past president of CASW and NASW, she is a Fellow of the AAAS, member of Sigma Xi, and on faculty at Hopkins's School of Public Health. The author of seven books, including Sex: A Natural History (Henry Holt), Rodgers has written widely for popular periodicals including The New York Times Magazine, Psychology Today, and Parade.

Cristine Russell, the president of CASW, is an award-winning freelance journalist who has written about science and medicine for more than three decades. She is a Fellow at Harvard University 's Kennedy School of Government, currently at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs and, in spring 2006, at the Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy. Russell was formerly a national science reporter for The Washington Post and The Washington Star. She is a past president of the National Association of Science Writers and a contributor to A Field Guide for Science Writers. Russell serves on the USC Annenberg School for Communication board and on the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. She is an honorary member of Sigma Xi, the scientific research society, and has a biology degree from Mills College.

Tom Siegfried is editor-in-chief of Science News. From 1985 to 2004 he was science editor of The Dallas Morning News. He is the author of The Bit and the Pendulum, Strange Matters, and A Beautiful Math. He is a contributor to the National Association of Science Writers' Field Guide for Science Writers. In 2006 he received the American Geophysical Union's Robert C. Cowen Award for Sustained Achievement in Science Journalism.