Boyce Rensberger has been a science journalist since 1966 at the Detroit Free Press. In 2008 he retired after ten years as director of the Knight Science Journalism Fellowships at MIT. The program gives opportunities for science, medical and environment writers on sabbatical to study at MIT and Harvard. For many years Rensberger was also co-director of the summer Science Journalism Program at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts.

Rensberger came to MIT in 1998 after 14 years as a science writer and science editor at The Washington Post. Before that he was at The New York Times from 1971 to 1979. Between those newspaper stints, he was head writer of the PBS science series for children, 3-2-1 Contact! and senior editor of Science 81–Science 84 magazine (the magazine changed its name each year). Rensberger has written four popular science books, most recently Life Itself: Exploring the Realm of the Living Cell.

Rensberger has twice won the AAAS's top award for science writing. He won the American Chemical Society's 2003 Grady-Stack Award for Interpreting Chemistry for the Public. In 1973–74 he was an Alicia Patterson Fellow, spending a year in East Africa studying human evolution and wildlife conservation. In 1987 he was a science writing fellow at the Marine Biological Laboratory. He is a fellow of the AAAS and a former chairman of its Committee on the Public Understanding of Science and Technology.