Carroll, Sean
Sean Carroll is a Senior Research Associate in Physics at the California Institute of Technology. He did his undergraduate work at Villanova University, and received his Ph.D. in Astrophysics from Harvard in 1993. His research involves theoretical physics and astrophysics, focusing on issues in cosmology, field theory, and gravitation.
Carroll is active in education and outreach, giving public lectures and appearing on radio and television. He is a blogger at Cosmic Variance (http://cosmicvariance.com), the most popular physics blog on the internet, with over 20,000 visits per week. He has written for SEED, Sky & Telescope, Nature, New Scientist, The American Scientist, and Physics Today. He is a frequent speaker, having given over two hundred scientific seminars and colloquia and over fifty educational and popular talks. His personal website (http://preposterousuniverse.com) contains links to his papers, talks, and other activities.
Prior to arriving at Caltech, Carroll was on the faculty of the Physics Department and Enrico Fermi Institute of the University of Chicago, and before that did postdoctoral research at MIT and at the Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He has made contributions to the theory of topological defects, violations of spacetime symmetries, two-dimensional quantum gravity, anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background, models of brane worlds and extra dimensions, the origin of cosmological magnetic fields, causality violation in general relativity, and quantum supergravity. His current research involves models of dark matter and dark energy, cosmological modifications of Einstein's general relativity, the physics of inflationary cosmology, and the origin of time asymmetry. He has also given invited talks at conferences devoted to literature, philosophy, education, and theology.
While a postdoc at MIT Carroll won the Graduate Student Council Teaching Award for his course on General Relativity. The lecture notes from this course have been expanded into the textbook "Spacetime and Geometry: An Introduction to General Relativity," published by Addison-Wesley in 2003. He has received research grants from NASA, the Department of Energy, and the National Science Foundation, as well as fellowships from the Sloan and Packard foundations. He has been the Malmstrom Lecturer at Hamline University and the Resnick Lecturer at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and was awarded the Arts and Sciences Alumni Medallion from Villanova University.
Ehrenstein, David
David Ehrenstein is the Editor of Physical Review Focus, a web site from the American Physical Society that explains in plain English selected physics research papers published in the APS journals Physical
Review and Physical Review Letters. The site is aimed at college physics majors, PhD's, and others with at least some minimal physics knowledge.
Ehrenstein got a physics PhD from the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign in 1994, was a biophysics post-doc at NIH in Bethesda, MD, until 1997, and then spent six months as an intern journalist at Science magazine in Washington, DC. APS hired him in 1998 to start the Focus web site.
His shift to science writing began during graduate school with an internship in 1993, where he realized that his strongest skills and interests were in interviewing a wide variety of scientists and explaining science. He also liked the idea of learning about many areas of science, rather than specializing.
Fink, Leslie
Leslie Fink currently heads media relations and public information at the National Science Foundation, a federal agency that supports basic research and education across all fields of science and engineering. For more than 20 years, she has been a science communicator for federal research programs in the Washington, DC area.
In 1989, she established and led the communications office of the newly launched Human Genome Project at the National Institutes of Health, and later led communications for the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the NIH component in charge of research on HIV, global infectious disease, and biodefense.
Leslie has produced science communication materials in almost every format but has a special fondness for video. She has received a CINE Golden Eagle award for a 20-minute piece on the Human Genome Project and a Gold Screen award from the National Association of Government Communicators for a short piece on young scientists.
Mostly recently, Leslie has been producing multi-media Web pieces and contemplating opportunities for organizational communicators amid the decline of science journalism and the changing mass-media landscape. She was part of a team that won a Webby People’s Choice Award in 2006 for the NSF Web site.
She holds a bachelor's degree in biology and completed the graduate program in science communication at the University of California at Santa Cruz. She was also a research assistant at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Franks, Sharon
Sharon Franks is founder and co-director of Scripps Institution of Oceanography’s Center for Educational Outreach Connections (CEOC) and co-PI for the NSF-funded Center for Ocean Sciences Education Excellence – California (COSEE-CA). Before coming to Scripps in 1993, Sharon earned her Ph.D. in geological oceanography at Oregon State University. Her current professional interests include: 1. catalyzing scientist-educator collaborations; and 2. fostering change in the academic culture so that scientists’ involvement in all forms of education and public outreach is increasingly recognized and rewarded. Sharon's golden retriever, Wally, shares her interests and her office at Scripps.
Gay, Tim
From 1999 until 2004, Tim Gay, a Professor of Physics at the University of Nebraska - Lincoln, taught the largest physics class in the world - the 78,000 fans that attend the University of Nebraska Cornhuskers home football games in Memorial Stadium. During a pause in the action, Gay's lessons were shown on the giant television screens at either end of the field. They ranged in length from forty-five seconds to two minutes, and covered such topics as Newton's Laws of Motion (blocking and tackling), projectile motion (kicking and punting), kinematics (open-field running), and the ideal gas law (why not fill the football with helium to get better hangtime?). Laboratory demonstrations featured Professor Gay being tackled by 370 pound lineman, pummeled with a sledgehammer as he lay on a bed of nails, and learning the finer points of passing from Heisman trophy winner Eric Crouch.
Gay's work has been featured on ABC World News Tonight with Peter Jennings, ESPN's Cold Pizza, and front page stories in the Wall Street Journal and the Tuesday Science section of the New York Times, as well as in People Magazine, ESPN Magazine, the Boston Globe, the Washington Post, and a variety of other television and radio outlets.
In 2001, Gay was hired by NFL Films to write and appear in a series of 5-minute television segments for their show NFL Blast! Blast! is a half-hour program shown in 190 foreign countries to familiarize its audience with the game of American football. The Football Physics segments on the show feature lectures and demonstrations by Gay and interviews with current NFL players. These segments aired starting in 2002, and ran through 2004.
Gay has also written a book, Football Physics, published by Rodale. It recently came out in a second edition retitled The Physics of Football published by Harper-Collins Paperbacks. Its target audience is high school students and football fans of all ages.
The Nebraska segments can be viewed on the Web at http://physics.unl.edu/outreach/football.html
Gibbs, W. Wayt
W. Wayt Gibbs is a contributing editor for Scientific American magazine and is Executive Editor at Intellectual Ventures, an invention and investment firm near Seattle. Gibbs studied physics and English at Cornell University, where he worked as a science writer for the school's national supercomputer center. After a brief stint as a science and technology reporter with The Economist in London, Gibbs joined Scientific American in 1992. He was promoted to Senior Writer in 1998, and served in that position until 2006. In his tenure with the magazine, Gibbs wrote more than 220 bylined articles for Scientific American. His work has been honored by the National Association of Science Writers, the Wistar Institute Science Journalism Award, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Science Journalism Award. One of his recent articles was included in the Best American Science Writing 2006 anthology.
Kelly, Kristine
Kristine Kelly is a science writer and public relations officer at Rockefeller University in New York. She was a 2004 AAAS Mass Media and Communications Fellow and spent her fellowship at the Richmond Times-Dispatch, one of only three national papers that still has a weekly science section.
Prior to her job in science communications, Kelly was a graduate student in Developmental Biology at Weill Cornell Medical School in New York. She earned her Ph.D. exploring the genetics behind common heart defects, as well as the early establishment of the left-right axis. However, science communication was always at the back of her mind. As a double major in Biology and English Literature at Tufts University, Kelly found science writing to be the perfect marriage of her two interests.
Kelly spends her spare time trying to keep up with her dog, visiting her niece as often as possible, and training for marathons – the 2007 New York Marathon will be her third.
Ouellette, Jennifer
Jennifer Ouellette is a recovering
English major who stumbled into science writing quite by accident as a struggling freelance writer in New York City. Now based in Los Angeles,
California, she is the author ofBlack Bodies and Quantum Cats: Tales
From the Annals of Physics (2006) andThe
Physics of the Buffyverse (2007), both published by Penguin.
Much of Jennifer’s work has been in the science trade press. She is associate editor of APS
News, the monthly publication of The American Physical Society; covers science policy for the Materials
Research Society; and writes for the American Institute of Physics’ TV project, Discoveries
and Breakthroughs in Science, as well as its Inside Science News Service. She was also a
contributing editor for the now-defunct The Industrial Physicist magazine; a 1997
article on concert hall acoustics garnered her an award in science writing from the Acoustical Society of America. She is a card-carrying
member of the National
Association of Science Writers, and holds a black belt in Niseido jujitsu.
Jennifer is equally adept at writing about science in the popular press, most notably for Discover, Salon, and On Earth.
She has written about such varied topics as the acoustics of Mayan pyramids and New York City subways; fractal patterns in the paintings
of Jackson Pollock; and the precarious pitfalls of pseudoscience.
A strong advocate of public outreach and education in the sciences, Jennifer presides over the popular general science blog, Cocktail Party Physics, which doubles as an online prose laboratory and outlet for her writerly effluvia. She is currently hard at work drafting an outline for her third (as-yet-untitled) book.
Pasco, Stacey
Stacey Pasco is a Senior Program Associate in the Education and Human Resources Directorate at AAAS in Washington, D.C. She manages the Mass Media Science & Engineering Fellowship, which places graduate and post-graduate science, mathematics and engineering students at national media sites to work as science reporters for the summer. Now in its 33rd year, the Fellowship has graduated more than 500 alumni. In addition to the Fellowship, Pasco manages the Minority Science Writers Internship at SCIENCE magazine. Now in its third year, the Internship provides opportunities for minority undergraduate journalism students to experience the rewards of science writing.
Pasco has contributed to a number of PUST initiatives including co-producing the Delta SEE Connection radio show as part of the Delta SEE (Science & Everyday Experiences) program, which encourages informal mathematics and science learning experiences for African American youth and their families. Pasco has also worked on the outreach components for the television series “Journey to Planet Earth: An Annual Report” and “The Power of Small,” an upcoming Fred Friendly Seminar’s television production on nanotechnology.
Before joining AAAS, Pasco evaluated web content for AOL and was part of the public relations and outreach staff at public television station KTEH. She is a graduate of California State University, Chico, and holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in Journalism and Political Science.
Perkowitz, Sidney
Sidney Perkowitz is the Charles Howard
Candler Professor of Physics at Emory University. Trained as a condensed-matter physicist, Perkowitz’s interests turned in 1990 to
presenting science to non-scientists via books and articles, the media, lectures, museum exhibits, and stage and screen works. His popular
science books, Empire of Light, Universal Foam and Digital People have been translated into seven languages. He
has written for The Sciences, Technology Review, the Washington Post, and others. Media appearances and lectures
include CNN, National Public Radio, the BBC, the Smithsonian Institution, and the NASA Space Flight Center, among others. He has written
the performance-dance piece Albert and Isadora, and the stage plays Friedmann's Balloon and Glory Enough. His
new book Hollywood Science, about the portrayal of science and scientists in film, will be published in Fall 2007, and he's at work
on a screenplay about cloning.
Rensberger, Boyce
Boyce Rensberger has been a science writer or science editor for more than 32 years, beginning in 1966 at The Deroit Free Press. From
there he went to The New York Times from 1971 through 1979. He left The Times to freelance and to become head writer of a PBS science
series for children, "3-2-1- Contact!" In 1981, he became senior editor of Science 81-Science 84, a popular monthly published magazine
by the American Association for the Advancement of Science. At the end of 1984 Rensberger went to The Washington Post, where he
served as science writer and science editor. At The Post, he created the paper's acclaimed monthly supplement, "Horizon: The
Learning Section." He became Director of the Knight Science Journalism Fellowships at MIT in June 1998.
Books:
Singer, Alexander
Alexander Singer is a semi-retired film Director: five features, over 280 television shows (mostly hour long dramatic) in all forms and genres, in more than forty years. He has both Directed and lectured as well as taught production and Directing at universities and institutions widely in the US, Mexico and Europe. He’s been the recipient of Emmy and Humanitas awards.
In 2001 Singer taught a full credit 17 week course at USC’s School of Electrical Engineering entitled “Enhancing Powers of Expression for Engineers: effective communication for engineers at the intersection of technology, the arts and multimedia”.
With the National Research Council he has been a participant in published white papers on: “Convergence of Computers, Telecommunications and Entertainment”; examining synergies between the Defense Modeling and Simulation Organization and the Entertainment Industry”. The NRC later “designated (Singer)…a lifetime National Associate of the National Academies” (of Science).
For the last four years, with his physicist colleague Martin Gunderson at USC and the AFI, Singer has been instrumental in creating annual
Real World seminars in Screenwriting called “Catalyst”: for scientists who want to communicate science to a wider public while
keeping their “day jobs”.
He was a participant and presenter at three DARPA ISAT (Information Science and Technology) study groups: “Building a Time Machine”; “Total
Recall: Combining Human and Digital Memory”; “Augmented Cognition”. This last experience morphed into the assignment to
produce the film, The Future of Augmented Cognition. DARPA has recently asked the “entangled” Judy and Alex team to write, for
a projected volume, a Chapter about Virtual Environment Training in 2057, using “the metaphor of the Holodeck”.
Singer, Judith
Judith Singer is a Novelist, Short Story and Screenwriter, living in Los Angeles. She has two published novels: Glass Houses and Threshold. As a member of the Writers Guild of America she has written screenplays and treatments for television: “Santa Barbara”; “Loving Friends & Perfect Couples”; “Night Stalker”. With her husband, Alex Singer, she wrote the screenplay of Glass Houses for Columbia Pictures; for the Coalition for Children and Television she wrote the play, “Boxed In”. DARPA assigned her to write the script for the film “The Future of Augmented Cognition”. Judith has a lifelong exploration of C.P. Snows’ The Two Cultures amid a stack of Shakespeare CDs in the car, the flute in the living room, books and periodicals on history, art, science, technology everywhere and years of Conference residua.
Wertheim, Margaret
Margaret Wertheim is an internationally noted science writer and commentator whose work focuses on the relations between science and the wider cultural landscape. She is the author of Pythagoras' Trousers, a history of the relationship between physics and religion (Times Books/Norton paperback); and The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace: A History of Space from Dante to the Internet (Norton). A native Australian, Margaret has a BS majoring in pure and applied physics and a BA majoring in mathematics and computer science. She is a contributor to the New York Times Science Section and an Op-Ed contributor for the Los Angeles Times. From 2000-2005 she wrote the "Quark Soup" column for the LA Weekly (sister paper to the Village Voice) and is currently a contributing editor for both Cabinet, the internationally renowned arts and culture quarterly, and Cosmos (Australia). Her articles have appeared in many other places, including the Los Angeles Times Magazine, The Sciences, New Scientist, Times Literary Supplement, The Guardian, Salon and Wired. Margaret has contributed essays to more than a dozen scholarly anthologies including Architecture of Fear (Princeton University Press) and Prefiguring Cyberspace (MIT Press).
Margaret's writing has been included in Best American Science Writing (2003), edited by Oliver Sacks. In 2006 she won the excellence in journalism award from the American Institute of Biological Sciences and in 2004 she was the National Science Foundation's visiting journalist to Antarctica. Her book Pythagoras Trousers was awarded a Templeton Book Prize for Science and Religion, and her television series Catalyst (about science and technology, aimed at teenage girls), won numerous prizes around the world, including first prize (Golden Lion) at the International Children's Film and Television Festival in Cairo.
Wertheim has lectured widely at universities and colleges across America and abroad - including Harvard, Tufts, Oxford University, University of Oslo, University of Sydney, and Princeton Theological Seminary. She has been a keynote speaker at the International Design Conference Aspen, the "Sacred Space" conference at the Ecclesiastical Academy in Tutzing, Germany, the Royal Australian Institute of Architects, and the annual meeting of the German Women in Physics Society. In 2007 she was a panelist at the Sundance Film Festival. In 1998, and again in 2006, she was Australia's official spokeswoman for Science Week. In 1998 she also gave a series of lectures in South Africa. Margaret has written and produced interactive videos and television science programs, including the award-winning series "Catalyst," which aimed at teenage girls (for ABC Australia); and the PBS special "Faith and Reason". With her husband, Cameron Allan, she produced and directed "It's Jim's World .... we just live in it," a documentary about "outsider physicist" James Carter. Carter's work was the subject of an exhibition Wertheim curated in 2002 at the Santa Monica Museum of Art. She is currently writing a book about outsider science and role of imagination in theoretical physics called "Imagining the World," (to be published by Walker & Company).
In 2003, Margaret founded the Institute For Figuring, an innovative organization devoted to enhancing the public understanding of the aesthetic and poetic dimensions of science, mathematics and the technical arts. (www.theiff.org) The IFF hosts lectures, curates exhibitions, and publishes books on subjects such as the physics of snowflakes, mathematical paper folding, and hyperbolic space. Through the Institute, Wertheim has curated exhibitions on these subjects for galleries and museums in Los Angeles and New York, including Apexart (Summer 2005, New York), Machine Project (Summer 2006, Los Angeles), the Williamson Gallery at Art Center College of Design (Fall 2006, Pasadena), and the Museum of Jurassic Technology (Opening March 2007, Los Angeles). In Spring 2007 the Institutes' "Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef" will be shown at the Andy Warhol Museum (Pittsburg) as a centerpiece of the exhibition "Six Billion Perps Held Hostage: Artists Respond to Global Warming." Wertheim will also give the exhibition's opening night presentation. The Institute's work has been acknowledged in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Time Out New York, Christian Science Monitor, LA Weekly and many other publications.