Past lives
In the 1980s I was successively Science Correspondent, Science Editor and Features Editor for the THES. I spent most of the 1990s at UCL, where I ended up as Senior Lecturer in Science Communication in the Department of Science and Technology Studies and Head of Department. I left there to be Editorial Director at Penguin Press. I have also worked for Doctor newspaper, the old Advisory Board for the Research Councils and a Community Health Council. And I have taught courses, run workshops, or lectured at Birkbeck, City University and in China, Brazil, the USA and much of Europe. As this indicates, as well as a liking for sampling different organisational cultures, I like to mix up academic and journalistic writing, though nowadays the academic stuff is mostly on hold.Teaching-wise, I devised and ran the first round of the Birkbeck College Diploma in Science Communication, one of the first postgraduate science communication courses in the UK. At UCL I taught modules on science and mass media, genetics and society, popular science books, science writing and history of science, and ran workshops for doctoral students. I have also been examiner or academic evaluator for courses at King's College London, Royal Holloway College, The University of Bath, the University of the West of England and the Open University. Most recently I set up and now run the MSc in Creative non-fiction writing at Imperial College.
Aside from THES I have written for New Scientist, The Guardian, Times, Independent, FT, TES, TLS, New York Times, among others. I have also written reports, features, exhibition text and other things for clients including The Wellcome Trust, The Royal Society, ESRC, Genomics Forum, British Council, The Nuffield Foundation, UCLH Trust, NESTA, and The Open University.
I've won a couple of awards (from the ABSW and the BMA), and judged others, including the Medical Journalists' Association book awards, the THES Young Academic Author of the Year award, the science and nature category of the Grierson Documentary awards and the poetry section of the Whitbread prize.
I have also worked extensively with the Charles Darwin Trust on exploratory seminars on "culture" and "science" which will feed into the work of the Charles Darwin Forum, which explains itself here. And I have been a mentor for several NESTA projects, most notably working with Steve Mesure on his project Crescendo which you can read about here