In a previous life, Luigi Anzivino earned a Ph.D. in neuroscience, researching the brain's reward and attentional mechanisms. Currently, he designs, builds and facilitates hands-on "playful and inventive explorations" at the Exploratorium, San Francisco's museum of art, science and human perception. The infamous "magic bug" bit him when he started working at the Exploratorium and, in addition to compelling him to spend hours fiddling with cards in his spare time, it has provided him with an excuse to apply his hard-earned scientific knowledge to a subject he loves.

David Baron is health and science editor for The World, a daily international news program co-produced by the BBC World Service, PRI and WGBH in Boston. He oversees the show’s science content on the radio and the Web and produces his own science stories from around the world (most recently from Sweden, Peru, Sudan, India and Zambia).

A journalist, author and broadcaster, Baron decided early on to merge his passion for science (he majored in physics at Yale) with his love of public radio. From 1987 to 2000, he was a regular contributor of science reports to NPR news programs—first while serving as science reporter for WBUR in Boston, and later as an NPR science correspondent and substitute host of Talk of the Nation: Science Friday. He left NPR in 2000 to write The Beast in the Garden, a book about mountain lions in America’s suburbs, and to teach science journalism at Boston University. He found his way back to public radio and The World in 2005.

Baron’s work has received honors from such organizations as the Society of Environmental Journalists, American Medical Association and—on three occasions—the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He has served as a Knight Science Journalism Fellow at MIT and a Ted Scripps Fellow in Environmental Journalism at the University of Colorado. He chairs the advisory board of the Metcalf Institute for Marine and Environmental Reporting at the University of Rhode Island.

In pursuit of stories, Baron has braved erupting volcanoes, endured swarms of African safari ants and journeyed to the very bottom of the earth: the South Pole. When not on assignment, his preferred activity is hiking in the Rocky Mountains near his home in Boulder, Colorado.

Barry Brown is a professor of library science at the University of Montana's Mansfield Library in Missoula, Montana, where he has worked as the science librarian since 1990. He also holds a position as an affiliate faculty member in the university's Environmental Studies department. Prior to arriving in Montana, Brown obtained a master's degree in biology from the University of Alaska Fairbanks (with a research emphasis in freshwater ecology) and a master's degree in information and library studies from the University of Michigan.

Brown was an early Internet pioneer/evangelist. In 1991 he began teaching campus and statewide classes for librarians and library users on using the net for research, education and communication. As a science librarian he has provided extensive science information literacy instruction to university students and faculty. Recently he has researched, presented and published on comparisons of traditional discipline-specific databases versus newer multidisciplinary or freely available databases for various science disciplines. He has developed an outline for comprehensive science literature reviews and focuses on a handful of databases that cover most science topics well.

Mary Comerio is an internationally recognized expert on disaster recovery. She joined the faculty in the Department of Architecture at UC Berkeley in 1978 and served as chair of the department from 2006 until 2009. As an architect, she has designed numerous public and private facilities including market rate and affordable housing. Her research focuses on the costs and benefits of seismic rehabilitation (particularly housing), post-disaster recovery, and reconstruction and loss modeling. She is the author of Disaster Hits Home: New Policy for Urban Housing Recovery, (UC Press, 1998), and “Can Buildings be Made Earthquake Safe” (Science Vol. 312, No. 5771, April 14, 2006).

Comerio led the FEMA-sponsored Disaster Resistant University Program. Her research, together with the UC Berkeley campus seismic rehabilitation program, was recognized by Engineering News Record as one of the ten best seismic rehabilitation projects in the United States in 2006. She also led the Building Systems Research program in the Pacific Earthquake Engineering Research Center during the ten years when PEER was one of three NSF funded national earthquake centers. Comerio is currently working on an NSF Grand Challenge project focused on the mitigation of collapse risk in nonductile concrete buildings. She spent a sabbatical year (2009-2010) as a visiting fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California and consultant to the United Nations Environment Program on post-disaster recovery efforts in China and Haiti.

Russell D. Fernald is professor of neuroscience, biology and the Benjamin Scott Crocker Professor of Human Biology at Stanford University. He came to Stanford in 1991 from the University of Oregon where he was a founding member and director of the Institute for Neuroscience. His research is focused on how social behavior influences the brain.

In 1999, Fernald received the Javits Neuroscience Investigator Award, the highest honor bestowed on researchers by the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, for his distinguished contribution to neurological science. In 2003, Fernald was named a fellow in the American Association of Arts and Sciences for advancing "science or applications that are deemed scientifically or socially distinguished." In February of 2004, he received the prestigious Rank Prize, which honors research that has advanced scientific knowledge in the realm of vision or optoelectronics, for work that he did with collaborators on understanding how vertebrate lenses function.

Fernald was also awarded the Bing Fellowship (1996-1999) for innovative contributions to undergraduate education. And in 1998 he won the Allen V. Cox medal for fostering undergraduates' interest in research because he was "an inspiration who engages neophyte scientists in meaningful research and provides remarkable mentorship." In 2000, he was awarded the Lloyd W. Dinkelspiel Award for distinctive contribution to undergraduate education because he led the Human Biology Program "with infectious enthusiasm, creativity and high standards" and was responsible for "inspiring undergraduates to pursue research and careers in neuroscience and for expanding offerings in service learning for students interested in studying community health issues."

In 2003, Professor Fernald was named the Mimi and Peter Haas University Fellow in Undergraduate Education because of his important role in the Human Biology Program, mentoring of undergraduate research, contributions to service-learning programs at the Haas Center for Public Service and participation in Sophomore College and Sophomore Seminars.

Dr. Brent Iverson is chairman of the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at the University of Texas at Austin. He is also the Warren J. and Viola Mae Raymer Professor and a Distinguished Teaching Professor.

Iverson has always been fascinated by the natural world. As a boy, he gravitated toward all things math, science, baseball and golf. During the summer after his freshman year at Stanford, he worked in a research lab and his life's path became clear. He abandoned thoughts of a professional golf career because he discovered his true passion was science in general and chemistry in particular. After his postdoctoral work, he decided to take a position at the University of Texas because he wanted to become a teacher-scholar, not just a researcher. Iverson holds over a dozen issued patents, is the author of a popular organic chemistry textbook, and his laboratory has developed a cure for anthrax that has been licensed commercially and is in very late stage development. In recent years, his love of sports has been focused on running. He and his wife have completed a combined 24 marathons.

Stephen Jenkins is a professor of biology at the University of Nevada, Reno, where he has taught long enough to have had several sets of parents and children as students. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1975 and has studied the behavior and ecology of mammals as familiar as beavers and wild horses, and as unfamiliar as kangaroo rats. Most recently he has been interested in the evolution of personalities in kangaroo rats, asking why some are shy and others are bold and why males seem to have more variable personalities than females.

Like most academics, Jenkins has published technical papers for specialists in professional journals. He has gradually become convinced that scientists need to communicate with a more diverse audience and has had some recent opportunities to do this. Wild horses on public lands are a flash point of controversy in the western U.S. and Jenkins developed a computer model that is used by the Bureau of Land Management to plan population control measures for horses. This model influences how BLM managers interact with advocates for and against controlling horse populations on public lands. In 2004, Oxford University Press published his book, How Science Works: Evaluating Evidence in Biology and Medicine. The book uses several case studies to illustrate key aspects of the process of science for general readers.

Jenkins has taught introductory biology to non-majors, research design to graduate students and upper-division classes in ecology and mammalogy. He received the Outstanding Mentor Award of the UNR Graduate Student Association in 2000 and the LeMay Outstanding Teaching Award of the College of Science in 2009.

Mary Beth Kirchner is a veteran independent producer who has worked for the past 20 years developing award-winning programming for public radio and network television. For more than a decade, her programs have focused on the brain.

Kirchner has worked under the auspices of the Dana Foundation in New York, a leading funder of neuroscience, to create the public radio documentary series, Gray Matters, which has been heard on over 250 stations nationwide. Produced from 1998-2008, Gray Matters featured more than 20 hour-long documentaries on cutting-edge brain science, with topics ranging from Alzheimer’s disease and addiction to neuroethics and the arts. Kirchner has also produced three Friday Night Specials for ABC News Nightline on the brain with correspondent Robert Krulwich. Explaining the brain has been a great passion of hers for the last decade. In a recent review of her work, one media critic wrote, “It seems probable that no other radio producer has examined so many aspects of what must be the most important part of our human anatomy.”

With an extensive track record in public broadcasting, Kirchner has received over 50 national and international awards. These include a duPont-Columbia University Silver Baton and three Gold Medals from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting for her documentaries, radio dramas and music series, which were selected as public radio's best cultural programming of the year.

In 1993, Kirchner started her own production company after having served as national programming director for radio at WETA in Washington, D.C. Before that she was executive producer at the Smithsonian Institution's Office of Telecommunications. Her productions include collaborations with National Public Radio, Public Radio International, the Smithsonian Institution, Carnegie Hall, the Wolf Trap Foundation for the Performing Arts, the Western Folklife Center, the BBC, the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, the Asia Society, NHK (Japan's public broadcaster) and ABC News.

Andrea Kissack is the senior editor, narrator and host of QUEST on NPR, and a reporter for KQED Public Radio. Born in Los Angeles, she discovered radio news listening to her college radio station. With a curious mind and a love for telling stories, she set off for Tampa where she landed her first job as a reporter for Florida Public Radio. After three years reporting in an unbearably humid climate and a brief stint as a miscast opera reporter, she returned to L.A. to work for public radio, then for television news and finally as a reporter for CBS radio.

Kissack has been at KQED for more than twelve years, working first as a producer for Forum, and then as the senior producer for The California Report. Most recently she produced Health Dialogues and other projects. She says she feels lucky to cover emerging science and environmental trends in a place where geek is chic. Her stories can be heard on a variety of networks, including NPR.

Dr. Norma Kobzina is the head of Information Services at the Marian Koshland Bioscience and Natural Resources Library at UC Berkeley. She is responsible for the natural resources collections, which include environmental science, forestry, conservation resources, insect biology, nutrition and food science, agricultural economics, and plant and microbial biology. In 2001 Kobzina received the Distinguished Librarian Award from the Librarians Association of the University of California, Berkeley.

She is also coordinator of bibliographic instruction. Each semester she gives numerous lectures, including classes in science journalism. In addition, this spring she will be teaching a course in the Library Technology program at Diablo Valley College on reference and research sources.

Kobzina taught in the School of Library and Information Science at UC Berkeley for several years. Prior to starting a career in librarianship, she was a professor of Spanish at College of Notre Dame in Belmont, California. She holds a Ph.D. in Spanish from Cornell University, and a M.L.I.S. from University of California, Berkeley, as well as a bachelor's in Spanish from the City College of New York. She is active in various library organizations, and recently served as president of USAIN, the United States Agricultural Information Network.

Arnold Kriegstein, M.D., Ph.D., is a professor of neurology, the John Bowes Distinguished Professor in Stem Cell and Tissue Biology, and the director of the Eli and Edythe Broad Center of Regeneration Medicine and Stem Cell Research at the University of California, San Francisco. Dr. Kriegstein received his M.D. and Ph.D. degrees from New York University and his undergraduate degree from Yale University. He completed his residence training in neurology at Harvard University and the Brigham and Women’s Hospital, the Beth Israel Hospital and the Boston Children’s Hospital, and has held academic appointments at Stanford University, Yale University and Columbia University.

Kriegstein has an international reputation for his research in the areas of neocortical development, neural differentiation, and neural stem and progenitor cell biology. His awards include the Javits Award from the NIH and being named the Stanford University William M. Hume Faculty Scholar and elected to the National Institute of Medicine in 2008.

As director of the Eli and Edythe Broad Center of Regeneration Medicine and Stem Cell Research, Kriegstein oversees one of the largest and most comprehensive stem cell programs in the United States. The center encompasses over 120 laboratories carrying out studies aimed at gaining fundamental information about human development, with an eye toward illuminating and treating a broad range of diseases and disorders, from heart disease and diabetes to cancer and neurological disorders, including epilepsy, Parkinson’s disease and brain injury. Kriegstein's research focuses on the way in which neural stem and progenitor cells in the embryonic brain produce neurons, and ways in which this information can be used for cell-based therapies to treat diseases of the nervous system.

Sally Lehrman is Santa Clara University’s Knight Ridder-San Jose Mercury News Endowed Chair in Journalism and the Public Interest. She is also an independent journalist who specializes in covering race relations, identity and gender within the context of medicine and science.

Lehrman’s byline credits include Scientific American, Health, Salon.com, Nature, The Boston Globe and The DNA Files, which has produced three series of public radio documentaries on genetics distributed by National Public Radio. Her honors have included the 1995-96 John S. Knight Fellowship, a 2002 Peabody award, Peabody/Robert Wood Johnson Award for excellence in health and medical programming, and the duPont-Columbia University Silver Baton (for The DNA Files).

Lehrman is author of News in a New America, a fresh take on diversity in coverage and staffing, and served for a decade as national diversity chair for the Society of Professional Journalists. She is an Institute for Justice and Journalism Senior Fellow on race (http://www.justicejournalism.org/) and was a staff writer and editor for the Hearst-owned San Francisco Examiner.

Chris McKay is a research scientist with the NASA Ames Research Center. His current research focuses on the evolution of the solar system and the origin of life. He is also actively involved in planning for future Mars missions, including human exploration.

McKay has been involved in research in Mars-like environments on Earth, traveling to the Antarctic dry valleys, Siberia, the Canadian Arctic, and the Atacama & Sahara deserts to study life in these Mars-like environments. He was a co-investigator on the Huygens probe to Saturn’s moon Titan in 2005, the Mars Phoenix lander mission in 2008 and the Mars Science Laboratory mission for 2011.

Brent Mishler is the director of the University and Jepson Herbaria at University of California, Berkeley, as well as a professor in the Department of Integrative Biology, where he teaches phylogenetic systematics, plant diversity, evolution and island biology. A native southern Californian, he received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in biology from California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, in 1975 and 1978, and his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1984. He then joined the faculty at Duke University for nine years before moving to UC Berkeley in 1993.

His research interests are centered on the systematics, evolution and ecology of bryophytes, ranging from broad-scale relationships of mosses and liverworts to studies of systematics, reproductive biology, physiology, and ecology of the diverse moss genus Syntrichia. He also works on the overall phylogeny of green plants and the theory of systematics. He applies methods ranging from microscopy through growth experiments, DNA sequencing and genomics.

Mishler is active in public outreach, frequently teaching workshops for the general public and teachers about phylogenetics and evolution, as well as bryophyte systematics and ecology.

Award-winning journalist Charlie Petit has covered science for 40 years as a reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle and U.S. News & World Report and freelance writer for publications including National Geographic, Smithsonian Magazine, U.S. News & World Report and The New York Times. He recently became a regular contributing correspondent to Science News. (Recent stories are at http://tinyurl.com/2bhq87z.)

Petit is also a blogger for the Knight Science Journalism Tracker website, sponsored by the Knight Science Journalism Fellowship Program at MIT. For this he gathers and comments on the day’s mass media science news stories, publishing links to as many as several dozen stories by his colleagues daily. (The URL is http://ksjtracker.mit.edu.) A former president of the National Association of Science Writers and the Northern California Science Writers Association, Petit is the current vice president of the Council for the Advancement of Science Writing.

Petit won the American Association for the Advancement of Science magazine prize in 1999 for three U.S. News and World Report stories, and in 1990 for a San Francisco Chronicle series on the Amazon rainforest. He also won the American Geophysical Union’s David Perlman News Writing Award in 2003 for reporting on ocean circulation and the American Institute of Physics prize in 1991 for reporting on physics at very low temperatures. He has been an instructor at the Graduate School of Journalism at UC Berkeley, was a fellow in the Knight Science Journalism Fellowship Program at MIT in 1984 – 1985 and has a degree in astronomy from UC Berkeley.

Marilyn Pittman is an expert on performance, with over three decades of experience as a TV news anchor, talk show host, reporter, commentator and radio producer. Since 1990, the leading talent coach and consultant for National Public Radio and NPR stations, working with hundreds of anchors, hosts, and reporters. She also consults on management and programming.

A guest lecturer on performance at UC Berkeley’s School of Journalism and a workshop leader for the Knight Digital Media Center, Pittman trains journalists from all disciplines in on-camera and on-mic performance. Her current classes include Radio, Advanced Radio, and Video For The Web. Along with coaching performance, she does modules on writing, voice tracking and directing, story structure, and sound design.

Back in the 80’s, she produced and hosted two nationally syndicated radio series, one on American women playwrights, and the other on the new wave and punk music explosion. Her roots in radio began in the 70’s when she was a disc jockey and TV news anchor at commercial stations in Albuquerque.

Pittman's workshops and presentations have been featured at many industry conferences and conventions, including those of Public Radio News Directors Inc. (PRNDI), National Federation of Community Broadcasters, Radio-Television News Directors Association (now RTDNA), UNITY, and the Broadcast Education Association.

Pittman's years as a stand-up comic, professional narrator (including an Oscar-winning doc, “Deadly Deception”), and radio talk show host help her bring humor, wisdom, and a depth of experience to her clients.

Award-winning science journalist Alison Richards is deputy supervising senior editor at National Public Radio and a correspondent for NPR's Science Desk. She oversees the desk's daily output of science, environmental and technical stories and also edits Robert Krulwich. As a deputy head of the desk, she also plays a role in helping to manage health content. She has initiated and managed major series, including the year-long Climate Connections series with National Geographic, 2007-2008 and a 20-part series in 2010 on evolution: The Human Edge. She is currently helping to develop the desk's presence and identity on the Web. She was a winner of the 2009 National Academies Communication Award in the online category and shared the 2010 AAAS Kavli Science Journalism Award for work challenging the official estimates of the massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico with NPR science correspondent Richard Harris.

Richards is a strong advocate for the use of narrative journalism techniques in science reporting and for using a much greater variety of form and tone both on radio and the Web.

Before joining NPR in 1998, Richards worked many years for the British Broadcasting Corporation's radio science unit in London. She also prepared major exhibits on the physical sciences, ecology, Celtic and medieval archaeology and modern art and craft at the National Museum of Wales in Cardiff. She has co-authored several books, including A Passion for Science and Passionate Minds: The Inner World of Scientists, co-authored with Lewis Wolpert, as well as A Paradise Out of a Common Field and The New Book of Apples, co-authored with Joan Morgan.

Born in the United Kingdom, Richards has a degree in English language and literature from the University of Oxford. She lives in Washington, DC.

Jasper Rine joined the UC Berkeley faculty in 1982. His research spans the fields of genetics, molecular biology, and biochemistry. He was the director of the LBL Human Genome Center from 1991 to 1994, and more recently was the director of the Center for Computational Biology. His research accomplishments include the construction of the first genetic map of the dog genome, discovery of biochemical links between cholesterol biosynthesis and cancer-causing genes and the discovery of a mechanism of epigenetic inheritance. Most recently, his research focuses on understanding the impact of human genetic variation.

Rine is a recipient of the University Distinguished Teaching Award and is a professor of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Among his honors are election to the National Academy of Science and to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He is also a fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Dr. Benjamin Santer is an atmospheric scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL). His research focuses on topics including climate model evaluation, the use of statistical methods in climate science, and identification of natural and anthropogenic “fingerprints” in observed climate records. Santer’s early research on the climatic effects of combined changes in greenhouse gases and sulfate aerosols contributed to the historic “discernible human influence” conclusion of the 1995 Report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. He spent much of the last decade addressing the contentious issue of whether model-simulated changes in tropospheric temperature are in accord with satellite-based temperature measurements. His recent work has attempted to identify anthropogenic fingerprints in a number of different climate variables, such as tropopause height, atmospheric water vapor, the temperature of the stratosphere and troposphere, and ocean surface temperatures in hurricane formation regions.

Santer holds a Ph.D. in Climatology from the University of East Anglia, England, where he studied under Tom Wigley. After completion of his Ph.D. in 1987, he spent five years at the Max-Planck Institute for Meteorology in Germany, and worked with Klaus Hasselmann on the development and application of climate fingerprinting methods. In 1992, Santer joined Larry Gates at LLNL’s Program for Climate Model Diagnosis and Intercomparison.

Santer served as convening lead author of the climate-change detection and attribution chapter of the 1995 IPCC report. More recently, he was the convening lead author of a key chapter of the U.S. Climate Change Science Program’s report on “Temperature Trends in the Lower Atmosphere." His awards include the Norbert Gerbier–MUMM International Award (1998), a MacArthur Fellowship (1998), the U.S. Department of Energy's E.O. Lawrence Award (2002), and a Distinguished Scientist Fellowship from the U.S. Dept. of Energy, Office of Biological and Environmental Research (2005). He and his son Nicholas live in San Ramon and enjoy rock-climbing and exploring California.

Chris Somerville is the director of the Energy Biosciences Institute (EBI), a research institute at UC Berkeley, Lawrence Berkeley National Lab and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign initiated with a $500 million award from the energy company BP (www.energybiosciencesinstitute.org). He is the Philomathia Professor in Alternative Energy at UC Berkeley. He was a professor at Stanford University, Director of the Carnegie Institution for Science from 1994 – 2007 and a professor at Michigan State University from 1982 – 1993. He has published more than 230 scientific papers and patents in plant and microbial genetics, genomics, biochemistry and biotechnology.

Somerville’s current research is focused on the characterization of proteins, such as cellulose synthase, implicated in biomass synthesis and modification. He is a member of the US National Academy of Sciences, The Royal Society of London and the Royal Society of Canada and has received numerous scientific awards including: the Gibbs and Schull awards from the American Society of Plant Biologists; the Mendel Medal from the Genetics Society; the Hopkins medal from the Biochemical Society; the Khumo Award from the Plant Molecular Biology Society, and most recently the Balzan Award, which he shared with Elliot Meyerowitz (Caltech). He cofounded six scientific journals, was on the senior editorial board of Science for many years and founded a major database (TAIR) that receives more than 36 million hits a year. Together with Elliot Meyerowitz, he founded an online reference book sponsored by the American Society of Plant Biologists, The Arabidopsis Book, downloaded 82,000 times in 2010. He co-founded three biotechnology companies: Mendel Biotechnology, LS9 Inc, and Poetic Genetics.

Lauren Sommer is a multimedia producer for QUEST and a reporter for KQED Public Radio. As part of the QUEST team, Sommer has scaled Sierra Nevada peaks, hunted for newts in the rain, and desperately tried to get her sea legs - all in the pursuit of good radio. Originally from the Bay Area, Sommer attended Cornell University and has a background in environmental policy. Before joining KQED, she cruised bunny slopes as a ski instructor in Tahoe, California and ate croissants in France as a travel writer for Frommer's. Her work has appeared in National Geographic Adventure and Sierra magazine and on Marketplace and NPR's Morning Edition.

Dr. Michael Starbird is a University Distinguished Teaching Professor at the University of Texas at Austin and a member of UT’s Academy of Distinguished Teachers. He received his bachelor’s degree from Pomona College and his Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He has remained at UT except for leaves including one to the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. He has received more than a dozen teaching awards, including several that are awarded to only one professor at UT annually, and the Mathematical Association of America’s 2007 national teaching award.

Starbird and co-author Edward B. Burger wrote the award-winning mathematics textbook for liberal arts students, The Heart of Mathematics: An Invitation to Effective Thinking, and the trade book, Coincidences, Chaos, and All That Math Jazz: Making Light of Weighty Ideas. His Teaching Company video courses in the Great Courses Series on calculus, statistics, probability and geometry annually reach thousands of people in the general public. In 1989, Starbird was UT’s Recreational Sports Super Racquets Champion.

Andrea Swensrud is the project supervisor for QUEST Science Education at KQED Public Radio. She joined KQED in 2007 to coordinate education and outreach for the public television series Jean-Michel Cousteau: Ocean Adventures. Between working on Ocean Adventures and joining the QUEST team, she developed the educational resources for the 4-hour documentary Saving the Bay. Andrea graduated from UC Berkeley with a B.A. in Environmental Science and earned her M.A. in Teaching and Multiple Subject Teaching Credential from the University of San Francisco. Before arriving at KQED, she taught, developed and managed marine science and environmental education programs in Aspen, Catalina Island, and the Bay Area.

The senior producer for WNYC's RadioLab, Soren Wheeler got his bachelor’s degree in literature, creative writing and philosophy at the University of Wisconsin. After graduation, Wheeler was a project coordinator at the American Association for the Advancement of Science. At AAAS, Wheeler evaluated science and math tests and textbooks, designed professional development workshops for science teachers, wrote several peer-reviewed articles on science education, and co-authored the book Atlas of Science Literacy.

After leaving AAAS, Wheeler spent the next 6 years as a freelancer, developing workshops and online courses for K-16 science and math teachers aimed at helping them understand both the content they have to teach and the research on how students develop their understanding of those ideas and skills.

In 2006, Wheeler got a masters degree in science writing at Johns Hopkins University, was a freelance writer for a brief period, and eventually joined the team at WNYC's RadioLab. In almost 5 years at RadioLab, he has played many different roles and he is currently the senior producer of the series. In that role, Wheeler produces and edits segments, manages the production staff, oversees development of future content and coordinates the RadioLab's segments on NPR's Morning Edition. Wheeler has won awards for his work on segments about the periodic table and statistical understanding.