Science Journalism :: Future Directions in Science Journalism Conference

Ira Basen
Ira Basen has been with CBC Radio since 1984. He was senior producer at Sunday Morning and Quirks and Quarks. He has been involved in the creation of three network programs; The Inside Track (1985), This Morning (1997) and Workology (2001), as well as several special series, including “Spin Cycles”, a six-part look at PR and the media, that was broadcast on CBC Radio One in January/February 2007. He has also written for Saturday Night, The Globe and Mail, The Walrus, and cbc.ca. He has won several awards, including the Canadian Science Writers Association Award, the Canadian Nurses Association Award, and the New York Radio Festival Award. He has developed several training programs for CBC journalists, and has taught at the University of Toronto and Ryerson. In the fall of 2007, he will be teaching a course on “Critical Perspectives on Public Relations” at the University of Western Ontario, and a course in radio production at Ryerson University. He is the co-author of the Canadian edition of The Book of Lists (Knopf Canada, 2005).

Richard Black
Richard Black covers environmental issues for BBC News, primarily for the website but also for national and international radio. Most of his career was spent in BBC World Service reporting on scientific and environmental affairs, and presenting programmes with a similar brief. He was co-founder of the pioneering environment/development programme One Planet, and has reported from major international events such as the UNFCCC meeting in Nairobi in 2006, the UN World Summit in New York in 2005, and the UNAIDS summit in Barcelona in 2002. He has contributed to the BBC’s journalist training programmes directed at former Soviet bloc nations, and travelled extensively in the developing world.

Tammy Boyce
Dr. Tammy Boyce is the Research Councils UK Research Fellow in Risk, Science, Health and Communication at the Cardiff School of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies, Cardiff University, Wales. Her research interests include media coverage of health and science issues and the relationships between sources, public relations, journalists and the public. Her book Health, Risk and News: the MMR Vaccine and the Media was published by Peter Lang in 2007. She is currently involved in a number of projects including an examination of UK media coverage of science and technology and media coverage, production and audience reception of disfigurement, understanding the impact of user-generated content on news and the role of expertise in journalism.

Alan Boyle
As MSNBC.com's science editor, Alan Boyle runs a virtual curiosity shop of the physical sciences and space exploration, plus paleontology, archaeology and other ologies that strike his fancy. Since joining MSNBC.com in 1996, Boyle has won awards from the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the National Association of Science Writers, the Pirelli Relativity Challenge and the CMU Cybersecurity Journalism Awards program. He is a contributor to A Field Guide for Science Writers, the president of the Northwest Science Writers Association, the blogger behind Cosmic Log, and an occasional talking head on the MSNBC cable channel. During his 29 years of daily journalism in Cincinnati, Spokane and Seattle, he’s survived a hurricane, a volcanic eruption, a total solar eclipse and an earthquake. He has faith he'll survive the Internet as well.

Anne Casselman
Anne Casselman works as a freelance science writer in Vancouver. She completed an undergraduate degree in zoology from the University of Toronto, and went on to get a masters degree in science communication at Imperial College, London, before interning at Discover magazine in New York in 2005. Since then she has written for them regularly and has picked up other outlets here and there, which include National Geographic News, Seed magazine and Scientific American online.

Alan Cassels
Alan Cassels is a drug policy researcher with an interest in how clinical research and experience on pharmaceuticals gets translated for policy-makers, prescribers and consumers. He led a team of Canadian researchers to carry out the first ever study of Canadian newspaper coverage of new prescription drugs (published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal in April 2003) and has frequently reported on consumer drug issues for magazines, newspapers and the CBC Radio program Ideas. He is co-author, with Australian journalist Ray Moynihan of Selling Sickness: How the World’s Biggest Pharmaceutical Companies are Turning us All into Patients (Greystone Books, 2005) about the role of the ethical drug industry in helping to underwrite the creation and marketing of illness. His new book, The ABC’s of Disease Mongering (Emdash Book Publishing) is to be launched in the fall of 2007.

Cassels has lectured in journalism schools in Canada, the US and Australia on the essentials of pharmaceutical reporting and was the founder of Media Doctor Canada (www.mediadoctor.ca) a Web-based service dedicated to improving the quality of Canadian medical reporting.

Beth Haddon
Beth Haddon is a broadcast executive, now working as a communications consultant and adjunct professor at the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of British Columbia, where she also coordinates the school’s internship program.

She has held a range of senior positions in broadcasting and journalism in Canada including head of current affairs and features programming at CBC Radio, senior producer and Ottawa bureau chief for CBC Television’s The Journal, senior editor at The Globe and Mail and managing director of Programming at TVOntario. Her career spans all aspects of journalism and editorial management as well as management roles in corporate affairs and strategic planning.

Beth has taught journalism at Ryerson University, worked in Africa with Canadian University Service Overseas and served on a variety of not for profit boards.

She is an active volunteer, presently serving on the board of the B.C. provincial educational broadcaster, Knowledge Network and the board of directors of Hollyhock, Canada’s leading educational retreat center based on Cortez Island. As well, she’s a member of the programming committee of the Canadian Journalism Foundation and a member of the advisory board of the Coady International Institute at St. Francis Xavier University in Antigonish, Nova Scotia.

François Heinderyckx
François Heinderyckx is Professor of media sociology and political communication at Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB) where he chairs the master in information and communication. He is also president of the European Communication Research and Education Association (ECREA).

Alfred Hermida
Alfred Hermida is an Assistant Professor at the University of British Columbia School of Journalism, and a founding member of the award-winning BBCNews.com website. He joined the faculty of the graduate School of Journalism at the University of British Columbia in the summer of 2006 to develop new courses in multiplatform journalism and in science journalism.

He was a daily news editor for BBCNews.com for four years, during which time the site became widely recognized as an online news pioneer and one of the best news sites worldwide. Later, as technology editor for the website, he wrote extensively about trends in new media.

Prof. Hermida joined the website after working in BBC radio and television national outlets, and after spending four years as a BBC foreign correspondent in the Middle East, mainly covering the Islamic insurgency in Algeria and the Israeli-Palestinian peace talks. He worked as a journalist for the BBC for a total of 16 years. His work has also appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The Times of London and The Guardian, and he has contributed to NPR and CBC.

His research interests include the impact of digital communications technology on journalism and new multiplatform models of journalism education. Prof. Hermida is a frequent commentator in the media on leading Internet trends, such as the rise of social media and the role of citizen journalism, and writes on developments in digital journalism at Reportr.net. He is currently working on a book about the history of the BBCNews.com.

Jaymie Matthews
Jaymie Matthews is an astro-paparazzo who unveils the hidden lifestyles of stars by eavesdropping on “the music of the spheres.” His version of an interstellar iPod is Canada’s first space telescope, MOST (Microvariability & Oscillations of STars), which detects vibrations in the light of ringing stars too subtle to be seen even by the largest telescopes on Earth. Dr. Matthews is the mission scientist, leading the Canadian Space Agency’s MOST project, and an astrophysics professor at the University of British Columbia. He is trying to write a biography of our Sun – past and future – by studying its neighbours in our galactic city, the Milky Way. His research sounds more like astromedicine than astrophysics: performing “ultrasound” on stellar embryos, checking on the hyperactivity of a pre-teen sun, and taking the pulses of stars in their twilight years. Dr. Matthews and his team are also using MOST to forecast the weather on planets beyond the Solar System, and they have begun the search for Terra Nova – alien Earths around other stars.

Dr. Matthews was awarded a 1999 Killam Prize for teaching excellence in the UBC Faculty of Science, as well as the 2002 Teaching Prize of the Canadian Association of Physicists. In 2006, he became an Officer of the Order of Canada. But he has yet to live down being quoted in Discover magazine as saying "Exploding Star Contains Atoms from Elvis Presley's Brain – Scientists Confirm the King of Rock & Roll Lived in Another Galaxy 160,000 Years Ago!”

Alanna Mitchell
Alanna Mitchell was a journalist at The Globe and Mail for 14 years, where her areas of expertise were earth sciences, the environment, social statistics and behavioural trends. Before that, she was a business journalist at The Financial Post.

She is the author of Dancing at the Dead Sea: Tracking the World’s Environmental Hotspots, which was published in 2004 in Canada and subsequently in the U.S., the U.K., Australia and New Zealand. It was named one of the five best non-fiction books in Canada in 2004 by Quill & Quire, the publishing industry’s trade magazine, and has enjoyed international critical acclaim.

In 2000, the IUCN and the Reuters Foundation named Mitchell the best environmental reporter in the world for her report on the vanishing forests of Madagascar. That led to a term of study at Green College, Oxford University in 2003 where she studied with Norman Myers.

She is currently finishing up her next book on the global ocean to be published internationally in the fall of 2008. She is also an associate at the International Institute for Sustainable Development on media issues.

David Secko
David Secko is an assistant professor in the Department of Journalism at Concordia University, where he studies journalism’s role in democratic governance and develops new models of scientific communication. He obtained his Ph.D. in microbiology and immunology in 2004 and masters of journalism in 2006 at the University of British Columbia. David is also a freelance science writer whose work has appeared in The Scientist, the Canadian Medical Association Journal, The Tyee and The Science Creative Quarterly.

Elizabeth M. Simpson
Dr. Elizabeth M. Simpson is senior scientist and associate professor at the Centre for Molecular Medicine and Therapeutics and in the Department of Medical Genetics at the University of British Columbia. She is also an associate of the Department of Psychiatry and holds a Canada Research Chair in Genetics and Behaviour. Her expertise is in human genetics, mouse genetics and genomics as well as mouse models of human brain disorders.

The overall goal of Dr. Simpson’s research program is to use genetically engineered mouse models to understand and improve treatment for human brain and behaviour disorders. Her approach is to study the genetics, behaviour, neurogenesis, and genome-wide transcription in mouse models of brain disorders. The expectation is that a clearer understanding of abnormal behaviour and brain pathologies in humans will lead to new and improved therapeutic strategies for these devastating conditions.

Her research has attracted significant mainstream media attention including Discovery Channel Canada, Quirks and Quarks, The Globe and Mail, the Vancouver Sun, and many more.

Stephen Ward
Stephen Ward is director and associate professor of journalism ethics at the graduate School of Journalism, University of British Columbia. His expertise includes the history of journalism ethics, news objectivity, and global journalism ethics, all areas in which he is an internationally recognized expert.

His The Invention of Journalism Ethics: The Path to Objectivity and Beyond, was published in 2005 by McGill-Queen’s University Press and won the 2005–2006 Harold Adams Innis Prize from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences for the best English-language scholarly book in the social sciences. Other writings on journalism ethics have appeared in the Journal of Mass Media Ethics, the Harvard International Journal of Press and Politics, and Journalism Studies.

He is the principle investigator of a four-year GE³LS (pronounced “gels” and short for genomics-related ethical, environmental, economic, legal, and societal issues) project to improve science journalism by exploring new models for science journalism and new strategies for genomic communication. The study is part of a larger brain disorder study, the Pleiades Promoter Project, funded by Genome Canada.

Prof. Ward is associate editor of the Journal of Mass Media Ethics, a media ethics columnist for Media magazine, and director of two Web sites: www.sciencejournalism.net, a comprehensive Web site on science journalism and news, and www.journalismethics.ca, Journalism Ethics for the Global Citizen, Canada’s only Web site for the analysis and promotion of journalism ethics.

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