Debbie Ponchner

Debbie Ponchner is a Costa Rica-based writer who was the Spanish-language editor for Scientific American. She started out as a science reporter for La Nación, the newspaper of record for Costa Rica. In 2005, she founded and served as editor of La Nación‘s first daily science section, later becoming the newspaper’s managing editor and writing a weekly science column. She has won several journalism awards, including Costa Rica’s National Journalism Prize, the Jorge Vargas-Gené Award as well as the National Scientific Journalism Prize given by the National Council for Science and Technology of Costa Rica. She studied mass communication at the University of Costa Rica, specializing in science communication at Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona, Spain. She spent the academic year 2003–04 as a Knight Science Journalism Fellow at MIT.