Ashley Smart has been elected treasurer of the Council for the Advancement of Science Writing, a nonprofit organization working to increase the quality and quantity of science news reaching the public.
Smart, who has served on CASW’s Board of Directors since 2017, was elected during the board’s annual meeting April 28. He succeeds Richard Harris, retired science correspondent at National Public Radio, who served as treasurer from 2016 to 2023.
Ashley Smart
Smart is the associate director of the Knight Science Journalism Program at MIT and a senior editor at Undark magazine. He previously spent eight years as an editor and reporter at Physics Today magazine and co-founded the science news blog HBSciU. Smart was a 2015-16 Knight Science Journalism Fellow and is a member of the advisory board of The Open Notebook. He holds a Ph.D. in chemical and biological engineering from Northwestern University.
Officers re-elected at the Board’s annual meeting are:
- President Robin Lloyd, freelance writer and contributing editor to Scientific American.
- Vice President Christie Aschwanden, freelance journalist, podcaster, author of Good to Go: What the Athlete in All of Us Can Learn from the Strange Science of Recovery, and formerly lead science writer at FiveThirtyEight.
- Secretary Betsy Mason, freelance writer, co-author of All Over the Map: A Cartographic Odyssey, and a 2022 Alicia Patterson Foundation Fellow.
Smart, Aschwanden, and Mason were elected to one-year terms. Under a recent bylaw change extending the president’s term, Lloyd will serve for three years.
Lloyd and Aschwanden were first elected president and vice president in 2021. Mason has served as secretary since 2018.
