As an assistant professor in the School of Communication at American University, Matthew Nisbet studies scientific and environmental controversies. Part of his work involves examining the interactions between experts, journalists, and the public. He tracks these issues in his blog, Framing Science (http://scienceblogs.com/framing-science). In "The Future of Public Engagement", he and Dietram Scheufele, professor of life sciences communication at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, write about how scientists and scientific organizations should communicate controversial issues to the media and public. "Certainly the [framing] research is very valuable" for helping scientists to engage a nonscientific audience, he says.
A correspondent for The Scientist for the last two years, Melissa Lee Phillips is a full-time freelance science writer. Her stories have appeared in Environmental Health Perspectives, BioScience, and New Scientist. Between 2001 and 2004, she worked in a neurobiology laboratory at the University of Washington in Seattle. In "Genomic Alterations 2.0", ...
