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 he produces his own science stories from around the world (most recently from Sweden, Peru and Sudan).
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’s 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.