Congratulations to two lecturers for recent honors:

Paul Rogers for his team's July 2009 award from the Society for Environmental Journalists. The team won 1st place in Outstanding Story, Television, Large Market, for a program on KQED-TV's "QUEST" series on the Tagging of Pacific Predators project. Paul is QUEST's managing editor. Read more here.

Martha Mendoza for her Associated Press team's honorable mention in September 2009 in the National Association of Science Writers Science in Society Journalism Awards. Martha and two colleagues reported on pharmaceutical products in the nation's drinking water supplies in a multipart series in 2008. Read the full awards list here.

All lecturers in the Science Communication Program are professional journalists and editors in the San Francisco Bay Area. They teach courses in their specialties, and they gladly serve as mentors and advisers long after our students graduate.

Here is our current roster of lecturers:

Robert Irion, B.S., Program Director and Senior Lecturer (The Science Feature, Newswriting for Magazines, Multimedia Reporting). Freelance magazine journalist and former U.S. correspondent in astronomy and astrophysics for Science. National clients include Smithsonian, National Geographic, Scientific American, Discover, New Scientist, Sky & Telescope, Reader's Digest Books, the National Academies, and Muse. Rob has won three national writing awards, including one from the American Institute of Physics for his coauthored book, One Universe: At Home in the Cosmos (Joseph Henry Press, 2000). His cover story in the October 2006 Smithsonian, "The Planet Hunters," was cited as a notable story in The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2007; another Smithsonian story, "Homing In On Black Holes," received the 2010 David N. Schramm Award in High Energy Astrophysics Journalism from the American Astronomical Society. He is co-chair of the NASW Education Committee and is a longtime board member of the Northern California Science Writers Association. Rob has a B.S. in earth and planetary sciences from MIT. He worked for two years as a newspaper reporter in Boston before graduating from the Science Communication Program in 1988.

Peter Aldhous, Ph.D., Lecturer (Policy and Investigative Reporting). San Francisco bureau chief with New Scientist. Peter got his start in journalism in 1989 as a reporter for Nature, then fresh from a Ph.D. in animal behavior. Subsequent roles included European correspondent for Science, and news editor with New Scientist. Prior to moving to California in October 2005, he spent five years as chief news & features editor with Nature. Peter's main interests lie in the biological and social sciences, from genetics and stem cells, through ecology and conservation, to the psychology of addiction and crime. He is a keen roving correspondent, having reported from countries including Cameroon, Cambodia, China, Indonesia, Mexico, Russia, and Vietnam. His articles have won awards from the Association of British Science Writers, the Association of Health Care Journalists, the U.K. Guild of Health Writers, and the Wistar Institute.

Glennda Chui, M.J., Lecturer (Reporting Science News). Deputy editor, symmetry magazine, at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. Previously, she was the science, health and environment editor at the San Jose Mercury News, where she had covered science since 1986. She's also worked at her hometown paper, the Hayward Daily Review; the San Francisco Chronicle; and KTVU-TV. She holds a B.S. in biology from Cal State Hayward and a Master's degree in journalism from UC Berkeley, and was a Knight Science Journalism Fellow at MIT in 1988-89. She shared a staff Pulitzer Prize in 1990 for coverage of the Loma Prieta earthquake, and in 2001 received the American Geophysical Union's David Perlman Award for Excellence in Science Journalism – News.

Marc DesJardins, B.A., Lecturer (AP-style Newswriting). Night news editor, Santa Cruz Sentinel. Marc has been a reporter, editor and copy editor at community newspapers for the past 15 years. He has shared in numerous California Newspaper Publishers Association awards for spot news and writing, among others. He lives in Santa Cruz with his wife, Amba, and their new daughter, Linden.

Ken McLaughlin, M.S., Lecturer (Reporting Science News). Ken has been a journalist for more than three decades. He began his career at the Watsonville Register-Pajaronian and San Mateo Times. In 1982, he joined the San Jose Mercury News, where he’s been a reporter, assistant city editor, state editor, and editorial writer. He's written extensively about immigration, Asian and Latino affairs, race, demographics, and marine science. He's also edited the paper's science team. He has received awards from the Asian American Journalists Association, San Francisco Peninsula Press Club, United Press International, and Society of Professional Journalists. A Mercury News project he conceived on Santa Clara County turning a “majority minority” was cited in 2000 by Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism as distinguished coverage of race and ethnicity in America. He has a bachelor's degree in English literature and political science from the State University of New York at Albany and a master's in journalism from Stanford University.

Martha Mendoza, B.S., Lecturer (Policy and Investigative Reporting). National Writer for the Associated Press, based in San Jose. Martha's investigative reports have won numerous awards and prompted Congressional hearings, Pentagon investigations, and White House responses. She won a 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting as part of a team that revealed, with extensive documentation, how American soldiers early in the Korean War killed hundreds of civilians at the No Gun Ri bridge. She has won numerous other prestigious awards as well including a Headliner Award and a Polk Award. She was a 2001 Knight Fellow at Stanford University where she studied U.S. international policy and civilians, and she is the 2002 UC Santa Cruz Alumni Achievement Award winner. Martha's earlier award-winning works include investigative reports on flaws in the federal government's wild horses program and illegal child labor in the U.S. (Martha will report for AP from Mexico City throughout the 2009-10 academic year.)

Mary Miller, B.A., Lecturer (Multimedia Reporting). Science writer and Web producer at The Exploratorium, San Francisco's famous participatory science museum. Mary leads production teams that create content for the museum’s award-winning Website, writes a blog, and hosts live Webcasts that link museum and online audiences with scientists in the field. Mary has produced programs from the South Pole, Greenland, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratories, NASA Goddard’s giant clean room, and the synchrotron radiation laboratory at SLAC. She is co-author of “Watching Weather” (Henry Holt) and has written for numerous publications including Natural History, New Scientist, Smithsonian, Popular Science, California Wild, and The Sciences. She is past president and current board member of the Northern California Science Writers Association. Mary studied marine sciences at UC Santa Cruz and is a 1990 graduate of the Science Communication Program.

Paul Rogers, B.S., Lecturer (Reporting Science News). Lead environment reporter for the San Jose Mercury News since 1989. Paul was part of the Mercury News team that won a Pulitzer Prize in 1990 for coverage of the Loma Prieta earthquake. Other recognition for his work includes the 2001 David R. Brower Award, the Sierra Club's highest national award for environmental journalism. Paul has taught at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, and he also works as managing editor of "QUEST," a weekly TV and radio series about science and the environment on KQED, the San Francisco NPR and PBS affiliates. He lives in Santa Cruz with his wife, Leigh Poitinger, and their son, Owen. (Paul is on leave for 2009-11.)

Evelyn Strauss, Ph.D., Lecturer (The Science Essay). Director of Health Information Services for Mondobiotech, a Swiss company that focuses on rare diseases. Evi spearheads content development for a new website that aims to harness and share collective wisdom from patients, families, physicians, and researchers. The overarching goal is to help shorten diagnosis time for patients, enhance their access to appropriate therapies, and accelerate the pace of discovery about the physiological underpinnings of these conditions. Previous positions: Executive Director, Scientists Without Borders, and co-creator of the former Science of Aging Knowledge Environment (SAGE KE) at Science. Evi has written for Scientific American, Health, HHMI Bulletin, Stanford Medicine, WebMD, Salon.com, WebMD, Dating911, the Pew Charitable Trusts, and the annual Lasker Awards. Evi earned a B.S. in chemistry from UC Berkeley, a Ph.D. in biochemistry from UCSF, did postdoctoral work in microbiology at Stanford, and graduated from the Science Communication Program in 1998.

Lisa Strong-Aufhauser, B.A., Laboratory Coordinator (Multimedia Reporting). Lisa is a storyteller, with a lot of cool tools at her disposal. She's a writer, producer, cinematographer, video editor, and still photographer. She runs Strong Mountain Productions, a small media production company specializing in nature, science, and history stories for museum exhibits, web multimedia, and DVDs. Clients have included National Geographic's Crittercam, Yosemite National Park, the African American Museum and Library at Oakland, and the Petersburg Marine Mammal Center. Lisa is currently working for the San Francisco Exploratorium as a video producer on Ice Stories, which has included extensive travel to both the Arctic and Antarctica. Lisa has a dual B.A. from UC Santa Barbara in Environmental Biology and Environmental Studies. She graduated from the Science Communication Program in 1993.

professional visitors

Distinguished visiting lecturers teach detailed seminars; some meet privately with students for editorial sessions. Our annual guests include:

• Molly Bentley, San Francisco-based correspondent for BBC Radio and coproducer of "Are We Alone?" from the SETI Institute
• Ingfei Chen, Santa Cruz-based freelance and regular contributor to the New York Times, Discover, CR Magazine, VIA, and Caring.com
• Jennifer Kahn, San Francisco-based freelance and award-winning contributing editor for WIRED; also writes for The New Yorker, National Geographic, and Outside
• Greg Miller, San Francisco-based neuroscience correspondent and West Coast news reporter for Science
• Katharine Miller, managing editor of the Stanford-based magazine Biomedical Computation Review
• Leigh Poitinger, research director for the San Jose Mercury News
• Gordy Slack, Oakland-based freelance writer for Salon.com, Los Angeles Times, WIRED, and San Francisco Magazine; author of The Battle Over the Meaning of Everything, on the intelligent design trial in Dover, PA
• Ted Weinstein, San Francisco-based literary agent and author representative for many national narrative nonfiction books
• and many other guests presenting special sessions on media law, writers' contracts, children's writing, and book writing

Visitors are chosen for their desire to help new science writers and for their national prominence. Many students maintain contact with them after graduating from the program.