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News & KudosNatasha Mitchell (05-06) and the national radio program she hosts and produces with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, All in the Mind, has been honored with the Grand Award at the 2008 New York Radio Festivals for best entry across all categories, as well as a Gold World Medal in the Health/Medical category. Keith Seinfeld (07-08) has been named winner of the AAAS Science Journalism Award for radio. He won for a January 2007 series called "The Electric Brain," which told listeners to KPLU-FM in Seattle-Tacoma how scientists are finding new ways to use the brain's electrical properties to treat disease and injury. "This kind of radio journalism seizes a listener's attention while it delivers an understandable account of complicated science," said Jeff Nesmith, a Washington-based science writer for Cox Newspapers and one of the judges. Another, David Baron (89-90), global development editor for Public Radio International's "The World" program, praised the "vividness of the writing, the clarity of the scientific explanations, the superb use of sound, the dramatic storytelling." Seinfeld will receive the $3000 prize and a plaque at a ceremony during the February meeting of the AAAS in Boston. Steve Mirsky (03-04) was wcience-writer-in-residence at U of Wisconsin-Madison in October of 2007. Earlier in 2007, a selection of ten years' worth of Mirsky's monthly Scientific American humor columns were published in book form as Anti-Gravity: Allegedly Humorous Writing from Scientific American (The Lyons Press.) The winner of the Australasian Society for the Study of Obesity (ASSO) Media Award for 2007 was current Fellow Julie Robotham from the Sydney Morning Herald. The ASSO award recognises a journalist's key contribution of improving obesity related issues in all forms of the media. Current Fellow John Mangels' narrative science series "Plagued by Fear"
Jim Borg (86-87) was awarded the 2006 SPJ Hawaii Award in General/Enterprise Reporting for a two-part series in Honolulu Star-Bulletin. The series, "Accident Anniversary," looked at the anatomy of a traffic accident that killed a Girl Scout and motorcycle patrolman and injured two other cops. John Dillon (95-96) of Vermont Public Radio won two 2007 regional Edward R. Murrow awards from the Radio and Television News Directors Association (RTNDA) for his series on Mexican workers on Vermont farms. One award for for Continuing Coverage, the other for Investigative Reporting. Christoph Droesser (93-94) has written a new book, Der Mathematik-Verführer (The Math Seducer), that was published in Germany in August.
Adam Rogers (01-02) is trying his hand at television as a writer and correspondent for a new PBS series called Wired Science. If you've missed the first few episodes, you can catch them online. The latest book edited by Annalee Newitz (02-03), She's Such a Geek: Women Write about Science, Technology, and other Nerdy Stuff, has gone into second printing. KSJF founding director Victor McElheny appears with his first article in German in the September issue of SZ Wissen, the popular science magazine published by Sueddeutsche Zeitung in Munich. Victor writes on the occasion of the upcoming 50th anniversary of the flight of Sputnik 1. In 1957 he was a reporter with the Florence (S.C.) Morning News. In his article Victor describes how Sputnik and the era of space flight shaped the world and his own life, how it made a science reporter out of him. "I hesitantly asked Victor in an e-mail message if he would consider doing such a piece for us," says SZ Wissen editor Richard Friebe (Knight Fellow 06-07), "and the next day I had a manuscript in my inbox that needed virtually no work." See Victor's article here.
Valeria Román (05-06) has a new blog through her newspaper, El Clarín of Argentina. Launched in June 2007, the blog, Ensayo y Error (Trial and Error), examines advances and tensions in science. Román was recognized recently by the Konex Foundation as one of the 100 best journalists in Argentina. Former Fellows Bob Buderi (86-87) and Rebecca Zacks (05-06) have launched Xconomy, a new Web site based in Kendall Square. As they write in their Web site (here), "Xconomy is dedicated to providing business and technology leaders with timely, insightful, close-to-the-scene information about the local personalities, companies, and technological trends that best exemplify today’s high-tech economy." It has news items by proper journalists plus commentaries by some pretty big names in the fields the site covers. Among those folks, whom the site calls xconomists, are people well known to many Knight Fellows: Rod Brooks, Bob Langer, Phil Sharp, Chuck Vest, George Whitesides and our very own Vic McElheny.
A feature-length screenplay by Jim Dawson (87-88) won first place
in the script writing competition at the Appalachian Film Festival, which included entries from 13 eastern states.
The screenplay, "Cinderella Eight," is based on the true story of
eight high school misfits who, led by a rebellious loner and a
bitter, driven coach, turn a winless racing crew into the #1 rowing team
in the nation with a shot at the world championships in Henley,
England. Dawson, a senior news editor at Physics Today magazine in
Washington, DC, says he turned to screenwriting because it is creative and
interesting. Valeria Román (04-05) of El Clarín newspaper in Argentina has been elected a member-at-large of the World Federation of Science Journalists. Diran Onifade (01-02) of Nigerian TV has moved from Secretary to Vice President of the WFSJ. Congratulations to you both!
Richard Friebe (06-07), formerly of the Frankfurter Allgemeine was Jim Erickson (89-90) won the NASW's 2006 Science-in-Society Award for newspaper for his story "A Change in the Air," published in the Rocky Mountain News in December 2005. Marcia Bartusiak (94-95), recently won the 2006 Andrew W. Gemant Award of the American Institute of Physics, which annually recognizes the accomplishments of a person who has made significant contributions to cultural, artistic, or humanistic dimensions of physics. Past recepients include Stephen Hawking, Brian Greene, and Alan Lightman. Ed Struzik (95-96) won the Atkinson Fellowship in Public Policy, which awards $100,000 to a Canadian journalist to complete a year-long series of articles. Struzik will focus on on climate change and the Arctic. Struzik also has a new book, "Ten Rivers," which was published by CanWest Books in Spring 2006. The WGBH-NOVA film "Wave That Shook the World," for which Joe McMaster (05-06) was one of the producers, has been nominated for an Emmy Award for "Outstanding Continuing Coverage of a News Story - Long Form". The same film won the 2005 AAAS Science Journalism Award in television.
Since February '06, Steve Mirsky (03-04) has been doing the weekly podcast for Scientific American. He reports that the podcast gets about 60,000 downloads per week. Jim Asker (87-88) was honored in July by the UK's Royal Aeronautical Society for his reporting on very light jet aircraft and their potential to revolutionize aviation as “air taxis.” Asker, the managing editor of Aviation Week & Space Technology magazine, won the 2006 Aerospace Journalist of the Year Award for Best Business Aircraft Submission. Recently promoted to Full Professor at MIT, Mitchel Resnick (83-84) is also involved in a startup company, PicoCricket, that has introduced a new educational product for kids—a construction kit that combines art and technology. The product was featured in articles in The New York Times and in The Boston Globe. W. Wayt Gibbs (99-00) has taken a new position as Executive Editor at Intellectual Ventures, a young technology company in Bellevue, Washington. He will work on peer-reviewed journal articles as well as magazine pieces, newspaper columns, and books.
updated on June 27, 2008
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Seth Shulman (85-86) has writen a new book due out in January 2008, The Telephone Gambit: Chasing Alexander Graham Bell's Secret. Shulman reasearched the book during his year as a Dibner Fellow in the History of Science and Technology at MIT. He describes it as "a nonfiction historical detective story that sheds surprising new light on Bell's role in the invention of the telephone." Read more about the book
The first four books in a series of young adult science and adventure novels by Angela Posada Swafford (00-01) were published in summer of 2007. The series, Los Aventureros de la Ciencia (The Adventurers of Science), is designed to educate young adults about science. One of the four books within the series, Dinosaurios Sumergidos (Sunken Dinosaurs), was chosen by the Ministry of Education of Mexico to be included in the libraries of its public schools for 2007. See the series blog 
Trisha Gura (02-03) just completed her first book, Lying in Weight: the Hidden Epidemic of Eating Disorders in Adult Women. (Harper Collins, May 2007)
Usha Lee McFarling (92-93) and two colleagues at the Los Angeles Times have won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting for their widely acclaimed five-part series, 
The First Human: The Race to Discover Our Earliest Ancestors, by Ann Gibbons (87-88), is a finalist for The Los Angeles Times's Robert Kirsch Award for best science and technology book of 2006. Martha Henry interviewed Gibbons, a contributing correspondent for Science, for this site's 
Congratulations to