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.