Independent producer Jason Albert has taken a circuitous route to radio. He loves to explore the massive and microscopic – he has wandered the big hills of the Alaska Range and spent countless hours in a dark lab observing mitochondria migrate in rat neurons. He later spent nearly a decade teaching science in grades 5-12. His specialty was coaxing students to explore the world through their senses. During that time he also spent a year in southwestern Madagascar assisting with a behavioral ecology study of the ring-tailed lemur and piloting an atmospheric conditions data collection program for rural schools.

Albert’s leap to radio came when he realized his most common companion was field-recording gear. Now he produces multimedia content for websites including Outdoor Parent and Cyclocross magazine, collects oral histories, and has contributed to Living On Earth. In his home of Bend, Oregon, he can often be seen chasing two speedy boys around town.

Award-winning journalist Alex Chadwick has long experience as a program developer, host and correspondent for National Public Radio. He has been a reporter and on-air personality for all of NPR's major programs including All Things Considered and Weekend Edition, and played a key role in creating several of the network's most successful shows, including its most widely heard broadcast Morning Edition and Radio Expeditions, a series of award-winning specials co-produced by NPR and the National Geographic Society. He also hosted Day to Day, co-produced by NPR news and Slate magazine, and has reported from Asia, Africa and Central and South America. Chadwick was often called the best writer at NPR, and he has also scripted award-winning television documentaries for ABC, CBS and National Geographic. His three-hour CBS Reports special on violence, "In the Killing Fields of America," won an Emmy, a 1996 Peabody Award and the Robert F. Kennedy Award for reporting on the disadvantaged. Chadwick also created a TV feature called Interviews 50¢ for ABC's Day One news magazine and later turned it into a popular online feature for Slate.com.

Gigi Douban is an independent producer based in Birmingham, Alabama. Since moving to the South from her native New York 14 years ago, she has discovered that people around the country find Southern accents adorable. And what better way to give folks their Southern accent fix than through public radio?

She has produced radio stories on topics ranging from addictive apps to a hearing condition plaguing veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Her work can be heard on NPR, Marketplace, WBHM, PRI's The World, Studio 360 and nytimes.com. Before her happy leap into public radio, Douban covered education for The Birmingham News. She was a fellow in 2009 at the University of Maryland's Journalism Center on Children & Families. She has a bachelor's degree in English from the State University of New York. Her work has earned Green Eyeshade and Public Radio News Directors Incorporated awards.

Doubon devours all things food and fitness, and writes for magazines including Runner's World and Women's Health. In her free time, she enjoys cooking, cycling, running, swimming and birding.

Charlie Foster is a science producer for Youth Radio, a youth-driven media production company that delivers news and perspectives to a cross section of outlets, from NPR to The Huffington Post. He also edits Youth Radio's commentary series for WAMU in Washington, D.C. and blogs for Turnstyle.com.

Before joining Youth Radio in 2009, Foster covered Silicon Valley for Forbes Magazine and freelanced for NPR and The New York Times Magazine. He has worked as a reporter and news editor for the public radio station WLIU in Southampton, New York, and as an intern for NPR’s Science Desk and KQED’s QUEST science series. Foster has also taught high school biology and written for documentary films. He majored in biology at Gettysburg College and received a master’s degree in journalism from UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. He lives in Brooklyn, N.Y., with his wife and daughter.

Reid R. Frazier is a freelance writer and radio producer. He is a frequent contributor to the Allegheny Front, an environmental radio show in
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where he has produced stories on air pollution, landfills, and the gas boom triggered by the discovery of natural gas in the mile-deep Marcellus shale of Western Pennsylvania. His stories on brain imaging and pterosaurs have aired on NPR. Reid writes about paleontology, technology and medicine for several Pittsburgh-area magazines, and his work has appeared in the Philadelphia Inquirer.

He got his first exposure to science writing when he was a freelancer for the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine writing about drug discovery, regenerative medicine and computational biology, things he never studied as a writing and photography major at Hampshire College.

Prior to becoming a freelancer, Frazier worked as a reporter at the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review and the North Jersey Herald & News. Somewhere along the way, he went to Bolivia for a year to teach English and learn Spanish, and got a master's degree in social history from the University of Vermont. Frazier's first adult job was as a night shift donut finisher at Daddy D's Donuts in Pittsburgh. He lives in Pittsburgh with his wife and two daughters.

Megan Hall is the health care reporter for WRNI, Rhode Island Public Radio. Her work has appeared on NPR and nytimes.com as well as the streets of Providence, where she has blasted radio-guided walking and biking tours.

After graduating from Brown University with a degree in urban studies, she received a Fulbright in Vancouver, British Columbia, and produced a radio documentary about the city's attempts to preserve low-income housing.

Hall joined WRNI in 2008 after a long history with the station as a freelancer and an intern. She first developed a knack for making radio when she produced features for Brown Student Radio’s Inside/Out and ran the programs Bike Talk, Urban Mosaic and Mix Tape for the City. But her love of radio blossomed way back in elementary school when some station let her read the cafeteria menu over the airwaves.

Originally from Portland, Oregon, Hall now lives in Rhode Island with her husband, photojournalist Ryan T. Conaty, and their cats Flo and Jonic. She’s working on running a 5k in less than 20 minutes and knows how to crochet two things – arm warmers and beer cozies.

Josh Kurz started out as an embryo, 53 times smaller than a U.S. nickel. Born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, his experiments at an early age of fusing comedy and science through home video led to many nights filming in the basement. Eventually this passion led him to create offbeat science interstitial segments for ABC’s Nightline and Good Morning America. Highlights include Kurz dressing up as sheep and using large balls of Jell-O to explain cloning. Since then he has worked on a variety of projects for PBS, WGBH and KQED that have explored the economics of voting, the ecology of the Salton Sea and pizza. He is also a science contributor for NPR, exploring things like lobsters'anti-aging secrets and the mysteries of B-flat. Other fun facts: His hatred for cilantro is not a preference, it’s biological; he can count on his fingers in base 2, and he has never understood why artists title their work “untitled” and then in parenthesis put the actual title, i.e., ("Self Portrait")...is that not the title?

Véronique LaCapra is the science and technology reporter for St. Louis Public Radio. She first caught the radio bug writing commentaries for WAMU in Washington, D.C. After producing her first audio pieces at the Duke University's Center for Documentary Studies, she was hooked!

LaCapra has done ecological research in the Brazilian Pantanal, regulated pesticides for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, been a freelance writer and volunteer in South Africa and contributed radio features to the Voice of America in Washington, D.C. She earned a Ph.D. in ecosystem ecology from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and a B.A. in environmental policy and biology from Cornell University. LaCapra grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and in her mother’s home town of Auxerre, France.

Craig LeMoult is a general assignment reporter for NPR member-station WSHU in Fairfield, Connecticut. He is frequently drawn to stories about science and has a particular interest in environmental issues. He is also an adjunct professor at Sacred Heart University, where he teaches an undergraduate course in radio journalism and production. LeMoult began his career in public relations, and at Tufts University and Columbia University Medical Center he translated complicated research into understandable and relevant news stories. He made the switch to journalism after receiving a master’s degree from Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. His undergraduate degree in English is from Tufts University.

Euna Lhee is a reporter for Florida Public Radio as part of the HealthyState.org project – an initiative to bring Florida health news to younger audiences through multimedia storytelling. Based at WMFE Public Radio in Orlando, she covers medical research and biotechnology.

Previously, Lhee was a journalist specializing in HIV and gender issues for the Media Institute of Southern Africa in Gaborone, Botswana. She freelanced medical pieces for the local press and was also involved with building journalists' reporting capacity through the Hearts & Minds project, which aimed to improve the quantity, quality and scope of HIV and AIDS reporting in Africa.

Lhee has also been a reporter for Radio France Internationale and France 24 in Paris, producing radio and television pieces on healthcare policy, the economy and international politics. She participated in the Columbia University and Sciences Po Paris double degree program in journalism and holds master’s degrees from both institutions. A Bloomberg scholar, she attended Johns Hopkins University and Peabody Conservatory, where she graduated Phi Beta Kappa with a B.A. in history and B.M. in violin performance.

While pursuing journalism, she has also worked as a researcher in a breast cancer vaccine lab at the Johns Hopkins Medical Institute, a freelance violinist in France, a civil servant for the Ministry of Education in South Korea, and an international aid and development worker in Botswana.

A native of Chicago, Lhee speaks French and Korean fluently and enjoys cooking, children’s literature and travel.

Casey Miner is a writer and radio producer based in Oakland, California. Currently she reports on transportation and infrastructure for Crosscurrents, KALW’s daily newsmagazine, as part of a collaboration with WNYC’s Transportation Nation. Since joining the project she has produced stories on topics ranging from the Bay Area’s sole kayak commuter to the intricacies of engineering good pavement. Typical reading for this beat includes 400-page circulars (no pun intended) on the nuances of traffic roundabouts. Before beginning work as KALW’s resident transportation geek, Miner reported for the station on stories ranging from heartbroken penguins and Super Bowl psychology to northern California’s citizen militia. An alum of UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, her work has appeared in Mother Jones, Ode and Terrain magazines, as well as on Marketplace, American RadioWorks, forbes.com and wsj.com. Her favorite activity is regaling her friends with tales of bizarre behavior observed on the bus.

Peter O'Dowd recently took over as news director at KJZZ, the NPR member-station in Phoenix. He leads a growing news room that includes seven new reporters who cover immigration and border issues in six southwestern cities. Part of his mission is bringing more science journalism to Arizona.

In the past year, his reporting has aired on NPR’s Morning Edition, All Things Considered and Talk of the Nation, and American Public Media's Marketplace. He has covered technology, the housing bubble and the ever-present flap over immigration policy that keeps Arizona in the national spotlight.

O’Dowd began his radio career at Wyoming Public Radio. He has a master's degree from Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and has taught English in Tokyo, Japan.