Lecture: Award Winning Science Writer Charles Petit
Venue: Hancock Hall (Virginia Tech), Blacksburg
Directions: Google Map Link
Date: Wednesday, October 24, 2012
Time: 4:00 - 5:00 PM
Event Types: Speaking Engagements
Cost: Free

Description:
Charles Petit, the founding writer for the MIT Knight Science Journalism Tracker, and an award winning writer and editor, with more than four decades of experience covering science, technology, medicine, and the environment, will be Virginia Tech's College of Engineering Visiting Scholar and give a special presentation on Wednesday, October 24th in the Hancock Hall Auditorium.

His presentation is entitled "The Science Writing Game...or, everybody's got a story". The talk is free and open to Virginia Tech faculty, staff, students, and the general public.

Petit has been on the science and technology beat since 1970, including 26 years at the San Francisco Chronicle -- which he joined after two years at the Livermore Herald and News. At the Chronicle he broke news that the universe is not only expanding, but is accelerating outward. He has been on assignment in the stratosphere, 3,600 feet under the sea, the Arctic, and the Antarctic.

He joined the staff at U.S. News & World Report in 1998, and in 2005 became primarily a freelance writer. Since 2005 his articles have appeared in National Geographic, Smithsonian Magazine, Nature, U.S. News & World Report, Science News, and The New York Times. One of his Science News stories, "Stellar Oddballs," is included in the just-published, annual anthology Best American Science Writing 2012.

In 2011 Petit won the Robert C. Cowen Award for Sustained Achievement in Science Journalism given by the American Geophysical Union. This award, given no more often than every two years, recognizes a journalist for "significant, lasting, and consistent contributions to accurate reporting or writing" on the Earth and space sciences for the general public.

Petit is a former president of the National Association of Science Writers and of the Northern California Science Writers Association. He was an instructor at the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California at Berkeley, and is on the board of the Council for the Advancement of Science Writing. In 1984-85 he was a Fellow at the Vannevar Bush program at MIT, which since has become the Knight Science Journalism Fellowships.

For more information, visit: http://www.vtnews.vt.edu/articles/2012/10/101012-engineering-sciencewritertospeak.html

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