The Story Collider is launching its storytelling series in the nation's capital! Join us for a night of a true, personal stories about science, DC style. Hosted by Shane Hanlon and Farah Ahmad.
Stories by:
Anna Dausman is a nonprofit consultant and storyteller. As a former resident of Atlanta, GA she started telling stories at Carapace, Stories on the Square, Naked City, and Stories on the Edge of Night, the opening of the annual Peach State Storytelling Festival. In company with many things, she loves secondhand cookbooks, the study of language, and that noblest of birds - the chicken.
Joe Palca is a science correspondent for NPR. He comes to journalism from a science background, having received a Ph.D. in psychology from the University of California at Santa Cruz where he worked on human sleep physiology.
Since joining NPR in 1992, Dr. Palca has covered a range of science topics — everything from biomedical research to astronomy. He is currently focused on the eponymous series, “Joe’s Big Idea.” Stories in the series explore the minds and motivations of scientists and inventors.
Palca has also worked as a television science producer, a senior correspondent for Science Magazine, and Washington news editor of Nature.
Palca has won numerous awards, several of which came with attractive certificates. With Flora Lichtman, Palca is the co-author of Annoying: The Science of What Bugs Us (Wiley, 2011).
Kasha Patel is a science writer and stand-up comedienne based in Washington, D.C. In addition to telling jokes about her childhood in West Virginia, she runs a Science Comedy show where only funny science jokes and stories are allowed. She majored in chemistry at Wake Forest University in North Carolina and earned her Masters degree in Science Journalism at Boston University. She likes writing about Earth science and stories about the intersection of art and science.
Jeremy Richardson is from a third generation coal mining family in West Virginia. He works as a senior energy analyst at the Union of Concerned Scientists, where he focuses on the transition to a clean energy economy. Somehow, his family hasn’t disowned him—at least not yet!
In addition to analytical work on the Environmental Protection Agency’s carbon regulations, Jeremy has also researched the economic impacts of projected future coal production on the state’s economy and looked at the potential of other sectors for creating jobs, and he continues to highlight the importance of worker transition in his policy work.
He served as a postdoctoral fellow at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, studying the atmospheres of planets around other stars. Eventually he realized that he was more concerned about planet Earth, and made a transition into working on climate and energy policy. He was a science and technology policy fellow at the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2007-08. He received his Ph.D. and M.S. in physics from the University of Colorado at Boulder and has a B.S. in physics from West Virginia University.
Erik Vance is a native Bay Area writer replanted in Mexico as a non-native species. Before becoming a writer he was, at turns, a biologist, a rock climbing guide, an environmental consultant, and an environmental educator. His work focuses on the human element of science – the people who do it, those who benefit from it, and those who do not. He has written for The New York Times, Nature, Scientific American, Harper’s, National Geographic, and a number of other local and national outlets. He is currently working on his first book, under contract with National Geographic Press about how the mind and body continually twist and shape our realities.