Nancy Shute, president of the National Association of Science Writers (NASW), asked the new NASW board members (I am one) last week if we would help give assignments to travel fellows who won NASW grants to attend the ScienceWriters 2010 conference. This annual conference starts with a day of NASW workshops, and is followed by four days of talks by scientists and lab tours, presented by the Council for the Advancement of Science Writing — CASW. Fellows are asked to help cover the NASW meeting in return for the grants, and volunteers manage this process. This work involves handing out assignments, giving short deadlines and editing the written material. Adam Rogers, Mike Lemonick and me volunteered and decided to ask the fellows to cover the NASW workshops by blogging and tweeting on them. So this blog was born.
We hope the blog helps people follow the event remotely or keep up with concurrent sessions they might have missed, and serves to bring us together as a community. We'll aim to have posts go live within one hour of each session's completion.
Here are the names of this year's graduate fellows:
Melissae Fellet, Catherine Meyers, Danielle Venton, Allison Maclachlan, Susan Young, Nidhi Subbaraman, Sandeep Ravindran, Kirsten Traynor, Anne Johnson, Madeline McCurry Schmidt and Ferris Jabr.
And here are the names of the freelance fellows:
David Berreby, Marla Broadfoot, John C. Cannon, Jim Downing, Karen A. Frenkel, Virginia Hughes, Sara LaJeunesse, Alaina G. Levine, Roberta Kwok, Christine Mlot, Stephen Ornes, Janet Rae-Dupree, Kara Rogers, Beth Skwarecki, Dawn Stover, Renee Twombly, Cori Vanchieri, Emily Voigt and Marie Zhuikov.
Please congratulate them and stay tuned for introductory posts from the 20-odd fellows who will be blogging here.