Bill Kearney

William Kearney is executive director of the Office of News and Public Information at the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, where he also is editor of Issues in Science and Technology, which is co-published with Arizona State University.  Kearney has led media relations for hundreds of science, technology, and health policy reports and managed communications for large scientific conferences including the famous international summits on human gene editing in Washington in 2015 and Hong Kong in 2018, as well as Nobel Prize Summits in 2021 and 2023.  He directed other international science communication efforts, including for the African Science Academy Development Initiative, and he has presented at the World Conference of Science Journalists.

In 2010 he was assigned to the InterAcademy Council — a then Amsterdam-based organization of the world’s science academies — to manage communications for a review of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which culminated in a press conference at the United Nations.  For Issues, Kearney has interviewed many luminaries in science and public policy, including Nobel laureates Jennifer Doudna, the gene-editing pioneer, and Ben Bernanke, the former chair of the U.S. Federal Reserve.  He is co-editor of the book Realizing the Promise and Minimizing the Perils of AI for Science and the Scientific Community, published by University of Pennsylvania Press in 2025.  He has a bachelor’s degree in history and political science from the University of Massachusetts at Boston.