Congratulations to SciCom lecturers Peter Aldhous and Paul Rogers for their awards from the Society for Environmental Journalists. Aldhous won 2nd place in Outstanding Beat Reporting, Print, for five international investigative stories in New Scientist. Rogers and his colleagues won 1st place in Outstanding Story, Television, for a program on KQED-TV's "Quest" series on the threat posed to condors by lead bullets. Read their citations 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 roster of lecturers for 2008-09:

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. Other national clients include Smithsonian, National Geographic, Discover, New Scientist, Sky & Telescope, Reader's Digest Books, the National Academies, and Muse. Rob won writing awards from the American Institute of Physics for his coauthored book, One Universe: At Home in the Cosmos (Joseph Henry Press, 2000) and from the American Astronomical Society for a feature in Science. 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; his latest Smithsonian story, "Homing In On Black Holes," also appeared on the cover. 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 (Investigative and Policy Reporting). San Francisco bureau chief with New Scientist. He 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. He has taught newswriting and editing at Cabrillo College near Santa Cruz for the past decade.

Martha Mendoza, B.S., Lecturer (Investigative and Policy 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.

Mary Miller, B.A., Lecturer (Multimedia Reporting). Science writer and Web producer at The Exploratorium, San Francisco's famous participatory science museum. Mary has a background in marine studies and is a 1990 graduate of the Science Communication Program. She 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.

Paul Rogers, B.S., Lecturer (Reporting Science News) has been a reporter for the San Jose Mercury News since 1989, writing about environment and science issues. He 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 will be on leave for 2008-09 and 2009-10.)

Evelyn Strauss, Ph.D., Lecturer (The Science Essay). Executive Director, Scientists Without Borders, and co-creator of the Science of Aging Knowledge Environment (SAGE KE), Science's Web site for researchers in the field of aging, which launched in 2001. Evi ran the SAGE KE news department since its inception and oversaw the site from 2004 until it stopped publishing new content in 2007. Evi has freelanced for various publications and organizations, including Science (where she is a contributing correspondent), Scientific American, Health, HHMI Bulletin, Stanford Medicine, WebMD, the Pew Charitable Trusts, and the American Association for Microbiology. She writes the annual official citations for the Lasker Awards, bestowed each fall in New York. She has published essays in Salon, WebMD, and Dating911. Before graduating from the Science Communication Program in 1998, she earned a B.S. in chemistry from UC Berkeley, a Ph.D. in biochemistry from UCSF, and did postdoctoral work in microbiology at Stanford.

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. She spent a month in Greenland in July and will spend 6 weeks in Antarctica reporting on polar science from the field for the International Polar Year. Lisa has B.A.s from UC Santa Barbara in Environmental Biology and Environmental Studies. She graduated from the Science Communication Program in 1993.

professional advisors
Another unusual element of the program is visits by nationally known science editors and writers. These distinguished guests typically teach seminars, read and comment on student-written stories, and meet privately with individual students for half-hour editorial sessions. Guests have included:

• Paul Raeburn, was formerly a senior writer and editor at Business Week, where he covered science and medicine for seven years. He is the recipient of many distinguished writing awards and is also the author of Mars: Uncovering the Secrets of the Red Planet and The Last Harvest: The Genetic Gamble That Threatens to Destroy American Agriculture.
• Paul Hoffman, has been a special correspondent for Good Morning America and CBS This Morning. He was president of Encyclopaedia Britannica and editor-in-chief of Discover. He lives in Woodstock, New York.
• Fred Golden, former science editor of Time
• Geoffrey Carr, science and technology editor of The Economist (UK)
• Jerry Bishop, former science editor of The Wall Street Journal
• Ellis Rubinstein, Chief Executive Officer of the New York Academy of Sciences. former Editor of Science magazine.
• Cornelia Dean, science editor of The New York Times
• Allen Hammond, founding editor of Science '80s and Issues in Science and Technology (the latter published by the National Academy of Sciences)
• Leon Jaroff, founding editor of Discover
• Roger Swain, science essayist and science editor of Horticulture
• Avery Comarow, senior writer of U.S. News and World Report
• Michael Rogers, technology editor of Newsweek
• Eric Schrier, editor-in-chief of Health
• David Perlman, science editor of the San Francisco Chronicle and past president of the national Council for the Advancement of Science Writing
• Keay Davidson, science writer for the San Francisco Examiner and author of Carl Sagan: A Life and other books
• Alun Anderson, editor-in-chief of New Scientist
• Emily Loose, senior editor (science and technology) of John Wiley and Sons, New York
• and many others

The visitors are chosen for their enthusiasm for helping new science writers to develop as well as for their national prominence. Many students maintain contact with them after graduating from the program.