Welcome! This site is a bit like a business card - a brief introduction, with just a sampling of my writings and photography, primarily recent work. I invite you to contact me for details, a formal resume, or additional clips.

I write professionally about the physical sciences, technology and society, and history of science for national magazines, including profiles of people and places. I also write about adventure travel and history of exploration, and I photograph wildflowers and weather. A growing share of my work is drafting or editing the text of brochures and reports for government agencies, universities, and other nonprofit organizations. Usually I work with a professional designer of the organization's choice, but on request my work has included photography of meeting sessions and layout design.

Since June 2011, I have served as Senior Writer for the University of California High-Performance AstroComputing Center (UC-HiPACC); in 2012, I also was named a Contributing Editor for Sky & Telescope magazine. A former editor for Scientific American and IEEE Spectrum magazines in New York City, I also served as a communications specialist for the Operational Effectiveness Practice of McKinsey & Co. in Cleveland, Ohio, where I am now based. My master's degree (in history of science) is from New York University, and my bachelor's (in history, with a physics minor) from the University of California at Santa Cruz. I've taught scientific and technical writing at both companies and universities, including the Polytechnic University of New York in Brooklyn. In Spring 2010 and again in Spring 2011, I was a Presidential Fellow at Case Western Reserve University. In 2013, I was accepted as a Fellow at the Kalamazoo River Institute of the Institutes for Journalism & Natural Resources.

I've written, edited, or coauthored a dozen books for both adults and children on science, engineering, history, and bicycling. Credits include being lead writer for the millennium book for the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers - Engineering Tomorrow: Today's Technology Experts Envision the Next Century, with Dave Dooling and Janie Fouke (IEEE Press, 2000) - plus writing the Smithsonian Science 101 volume Weather (Smithsonian/HarperCollins, 2007) and The Great Dayton Flood of 1913 (Arcadia Publishing, 2008). My children's books are four titles in astronomy for middle school students. In November 2012, I launched a blog "'Our National Calamity': The Great Easter 1913 Flood" for the centennial of most widespread national disaster ever to afflict the U.S.

Nearly 500 of my feature articles have been published in Adventure Cyclist, Air & Space/Smithsonian, Astronomy, IEEE Spectrum, Nature, Ohio, The (Cleveland) Plain Dealer, Sky and Telescope, other national, regional, and specialized publications, and the popular Science @ NASA website. My 19 top journalism awards include the 2006 David N. Schramm Award of the American Astronomical Society. Twice I've received the Herbert C. Pollock Award of the Dudley Observatory to support research in the history of astronomy (2004, 2007) and was a Filson Fellow (2009) at the Filson Historical Society in Louisville, Kentucky, to support historical research on the 1913 flood in Kentucky. In 2010, I received a career grant to study photography from the National Association of Science Writers.

First person is the best way to get a fresh story on the ground. The photograph in the banner at the top of this web page above shows me standing atop the 2.5-mile-long X-arm of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) in Livingston, Louisiana, while on assignment for Air & Space/Smithsonian. Other assignments (a few shown in images below) have taken me to the Great Dunes in Colorado, Death Valley in California, the Johnson Island archaeological dig near Sandusky, Ohio, all three LIGO sites, many observatories and university laboratories and historical archives, and most NASA centers (Ames, Dryden, Glenn, Goddard, JPL, Johnson, Kennedy, and Langley). In personal travel, I've chased five total solar eclipses to remote parts of the world including into the Sahara Desert and the Arctic, spent five weeks trekking in the Himalaya up to Mount Everest base camp at 17,000 feet, and bicycled much of the 1,000-mile length of Baja California. 

Hm-m, does any Antarctic expedition need a seasoned writer?

(Page updated April 25, 2013)