Pressroom

Laura Helmuth is editor in chief of Scientific American. She has previously been health and science editor at the Washington Post, digital news director at National Geographic, science and health editor at Slate, science editor at Smithsonian, and a news editor and reporter at Science. Helmuth is a past president of the National Association of Science Writers. She is a member of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine’s standing committee on advancing science communication. She serves on the advisory boards of SciLine (a program of the American Association for the Advancement of Science that connects reporters with scientific experts), High Country News, Spectrum and 500 Women Scientists. Helmuth has a Ph.D. in cognitive neuroscience from the University of California, Berkeley, and attended the University of California, Santa Cruz’s science communication program. She speaks frequently on science communication, how to use social media effectively and how to fight misinformation. Her favorite hobbies are bird-watching, hiking and kayaking.

Jeanna Bryner is managing editor of Scientific American. Previously she was editor in chief of Live Science and, prior to that, an editor at Scholastic’s Science World magazine. Bryner has an English degree from Salisbury University, a master’s degree in biogeochemistry and environmental sciences from the University of Maryland and a graduate science journalism degree from New York University. She has worked as a biologist in Florida, where she monitored wetlands and did field surveys for endangered species, including the gorgeous Florida scrub jay. She also received an ocean sciences journalism fellowship from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. She is a firm believer that science is for everyone and that just about everything can be viewed through the lens of science.

Sunya Bhutta is an audience-development strategist and chief audience engagement editor at Scientific American. Her role includes managing Scientific American’s home page, social media, newsletters, mobile app and events. Previously she was associate editor at Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology News. Her work has also been published in Time Out New York, Chronogram and Hudson Valley magazine. She has a B.A. in English and journalism from SUNY New Paltz and studied magazine and website publishing at New York University.

Lee Billings is a senior editor covering space and physics for Scientific American. His freelance writing has appeared in many popular publications, including the New York Times, the Washington Post, Wired and Popular Mechanics. Billings is author of Five Billion Years of Solitude: The Search for Life among the Stars, which won an American Institute of Physics science writing award in the books category in 2014. He holds a degree in journalism from the University of Minnesota.

Sophie Bushwick is an associate editor who covers technology for Scientific American. Previously, she worked as an editor at Popular Science and as a freelance writer, podcast producer and video host for several publications, including Discover, Gizmodo and Inside Science. Bushwick received a bachelor’s degree in physics from Carleton College before winning an American Association for the Advancement of Science Mass Media Science & Engineering Fellowship, which she spent at Scientific American.

Jen Christiansen is author of Building Science Graphics: An Illustrated Guide to Communicating Science through Diagrams and Visualizations (CRC Press) and senior graphics editor at Scientific American, where she art directs and produces illustrated explanatory diagrams and data visualizations. In 1996 she began her publishing career in New York City at Scientific American. Subsequently she moved to Washington, D.C., to join the staff of National Geographic (first as an assistant art director–researcher hybrid and then as a designer), spent four years as a freelance science communicator and returned to Scientific American in 2007. Christiansen presents and writes on topics ranging from reconciling her love for art and science to her quest to learn more about the pulsar chart on the cover of Joy Division’s album Unknown Pleasures. She holds a graduate certificate in science communication from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and a B.A. in geology and studio art from Smith College.

Jeffery DelViscio is chief multimedia editor at Scientific American. Previously he was a Knight Science Journalism Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He helped co-found STAT, where he was the first director of multimedia and creative, overseeing all interactive journalism. While there, his team won many national awards, including a George Polk Award for environmental reporting in a collaboration with Undark Magazine. He started his journalism career at the New York Times, where he worked across five different desks over a period of eight and a half years, winning multiple awards along the way, including an Emmy Award. He holds dual master’s degrees in journalism and in earth and environmental sciences from Columbia University. Before entering journalism, DelViscio worked onboard oceanographic research vessels and tracked money and politics in science from Washington, D.C.

Arminda Downey-Mavromatis is associate engagement editor at Scientific American. She works on audience engagement, which includes managing Scientific American’s home page and social media, as well as engagement projects. Previously she was senior editorial project manager at Chemical & Engineering News. She has a B.A. in biochemistry from Barnard College of Columbia University. While in undergrad, she was an editor at The Eye, the magazine of the Columbia Daily Spectator.

Mark Fischetti oversees coverage of sustainability issues for Scientific American magazine, including climate, weather, environment, energy, food, water, biodiversity, population, and more. He assigns and edits features and news by journalists and scientists and also writes in all those formats. He edits the 50, 100 & 150 Years Ago column, which highlights novel stories the magazine has published over its long history. He has been part of small teams that started and then edited two spin-off magazines, Scientific American Mind and Scientific American Earth 3.0. His 2001 article “Drowning New Orleans” predicted the widespread disaster that a storm like Hurricane Katrina would impose on the city. His video What Happens to Your Body When You Die? now has 12 million views on YouTube. Fischetti has written freelance articles for the New York Times, Smithsonian, Technology Review, Fast Company, and many others. With Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, he co-authored the book Weaving the Web, which tells the real story of how the Web was created. He also co-authored The New Killer Diseases with microbiologist Elinor Levy. Fischetti is former managing editor of IEEE Spectrum magazine and of Family Business magazine. He has a physics degree and has twice served as Attaway Fellow in Civic Culture at Centenary College of Louisiana, which awarded him an honorary doctorate. Fischetti is a frequent broadcaster and has appeared on CNN, NBC’s Meet the Press, the History Channel, NPR News and many news radio stations.

Josh Fischman is a senior editor at Scientific American, leading coverage of medicine and of science policy from Washington, D.C. He co-hosts the COVID, Quickly podcast. His work has been selected for the Best American Science Writing 2012 anthology, and he has won the Blakeslee Award for excellence in medical reporting and other writing awards. He has written cover stories for National Geographic and U.S. News & World Report, as well as features for Time magazine and the Los Angeles Times. As an editor, Fischman has been fortunate to work on many stories that have won top journalism prizes. He has been editor in chief of Earth magazine and deputy editor in chief of Chemical & Engineering News, supervising worldwide coverage. He has directed technology and science coverage for the Chronicle of Higher Education and was a senior writer and editor at U.S News & World Report, a deputy news editor at Science and a senior editor at Discover. Fischman has been interviewed about science and medicine on NPR, CNN, MSNBC, BBC World Service and the Weather Channel, and he has been a master of ceremonies on stages at the USA Science & Engineering Festival and the Consumer Electronics Show. He is author of a leading medical education guidebook entitled The U.S. News & World Report Ultimate Guide to Medical Schools (Sourcebooks, 2006).

Priyamvada Natarajan, is an astrophysicist and Professor at Yale. She has made seminal contributions to our current understanding of the formation and growth of black holes and of the nature of dark matter by mapping it using gravitational lensing. Recipient of many awards & honors, Priya is also the current chair of the Division of Astrophysics of The American Physical Society. She is also the author of the critically acclaimed book Mapping the Heavens: The Radical Scientific Ideas that Reveal the Cosmos.

Emmanuelle Charpentier, Ph.D.is a French microbiologist, geneticist and biochemist. She is Founding and Acting Director of the Max Planck Unit for the Science of Pathogens, Scientific Director at the Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology and Honorary Professor at Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany. Emmanuelle has been widely recognized for her innovative research that laid the foundation for the ground-breaking CRISPR-Cas9 genome engineering technology. She has received numerous prestigious international awards and distinctions and is an elected member of national and international academies. She is co-founder of CRISPR Therapeutics and ERS Genomics.

Amie Wilkinson is a mathematician working in the area of Dynamical Systems.

Rosalind Picard, Sc.D, is founder and director of the Affective Computing Research Group at the MIT Media Laboratory, faculty chair of MIT’s MindHandHeart, cofounder and chief scientist of Empatica, which created the first FDA-cleared smart watch for neurology, and cofounder of Affectiva, providing emotion AI software and services. The author of over 300 peer-reviewed scientific articles, Picard is known internationally for her book Affective Computing, which helped launch the field of Affective Computing. An active inventor and holder of many patents, Picard is focused today on inventing emotionally smart AI technologies in service of better human health and wellbeing.

Prof. Satyajit Mayor is an Indian cell biologist. He directs the National Centre for Biological Sciences, TIFR, in Bangalore, India. With an M.Sc. in Chemistry from IIT Bombay, and Ph.D. in Life Sciences from The Rockefeller University, New York, his postdoctoral training was at at Columbia University, New York. The broad aim of Prof Mayor’s laboratory is to provide an understanding of Life at the Cell’s Edge by understanding the mechanisms behind cell membrane structure and organization, and endocytic processes in metazoan cells.

He is a Foreign Member of National Academy of Science (USA) and fellow of EMBO, and Indian National Science Academy and National Academy of Science, India.

Meg Urry directs the Yale Center for Astronomy and Astrophysics and was previously chair of the Yale Physics Department and President of the American Astronomical Society. She received her BS in physics and mathematics from Tufts University and her PhD from Johns Hopkins University. Her research focuses on active galaxies, which host massive black holes growing at their centers. She is a Fellow/Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Physical Society, American Women in Science, the Connecticut Academy of Science and Engineering, and the National Academy of Sciences.

Daniela Rus is the Andrew (1956) and Erna Viterbi Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and Director of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) at MIT. Rus's research interests are in robotics, machine learning, and artificial intelligence. The key focus of her research is to develop the science and engineering of autonomy. Rus is a Class of 2002 MacArthur Fellow, a fellow of ACM, AAAI and IEEE, and a member of the National Academy of Engineering and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She is the recipient of the Engelberger Award for robotics. She earned her PhD in Computer Science from Cornell University.

Dr. Nelson’s scientific research involves mechanistic patterns in alkene addition reactions and Single-Walled Carbon Nanotube (SWCNT) functionalization and analysis. Her work on America's scientific readiness focuses on (1) science education, including classroom innovations and correcting organic chemistry textbook inaccuracies, (2) ethnic and gender diversity (Nelson Diversity Surveys) among STEM departments of research universities, and (3) improving the image and presentation of science and scientists to the public. Nelson was science advisor to the AMC television show Breaking Bad and 2016 President of the American Chemical Society (ACS). She has almost 200 publications and dozens of awards; more information is available at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donna_Nelson .

Jennifer Francis earned a B.S. in Meteorology from San Jose State University in 1988 and a PhD in Atmospheric Sciences from the University of Washington in 1994. She was a Research Professor in the Department of Marine and Coastal Sciences at Rutgers University from 1994 to 2018, where she taught courses in satellite remote sensing and climate-change issues, and also co-founded and co-directed the Rutgers Climate and Environmental Change Initiative. Presently she is a Senior Scientist at the Woods Hole Research Center, where she studies Arctic climate change, Arctic-global climate linkages, climate policy, and science communication. She and her husband circumnavigated the world in a sailboat from 1980-1985, including Cape Horn and the Arctic, during which her interest in weather and the Arctic began.

John Maeda is Global Head of Computational Design + Inclusion at Automattic, Inc., former Design Partner at Kleiner Perkins, and former President of Rhode Island School of Design. He is author of The Laws of Simplicity and Redesigning Leadership. He holds degrees in Electrical Engineering + Computer Science from MIT, MBA from ASU, and PhD from University of Tsukuba in Japan. He has appeared as a speaker all over the world, and his talks for TED.com have received over 2 million views to date. Maeda is the recipient of numerous awards and can be found on Twitter at @johnmaeda.