Dennis Meredith: King of Scientific Communications

Talk Show host Dr. Arlene Barro created her WIN Without Competing! show for candidates, employees, entrepreneurs and employers to learn about her Right Fit Method from her guest interviews.

On WIN Without Competing! Dr. Arlene will interview distinguished science writer and communicator Dennis Meredith who is the author of Explaining Research, to be published by Oxford University Press on March 1st, 2010. Meredith, an adventurer, not only writes about science but also lives it. He wrote an article which included photos of what was believed to be the Loch Ness monster. This led to a New York Times-sponsored expedition to Loch Ness. Meredith served as the press officer on this expedition and wrote Search at Loch Ness.

Meredith has had a fascinating career. He ventured on the Loch Ness expedition with Harold “Doc” Edgerton, inventor of the strobe light; prepared the historic news release announcing synthesis of the first artificial gene by Nobel Prize winner Har Gobind Khorana, and helped Nobel Prizewinning physicist Richard Feynman explain his controversial opinions about the cause of the space shuttle Challenger disaster. Meredith worked at some of the country’s leading research universities, including MIT, Caltech, Cornell, Duke and the University of Wisconsin. He has helped science journalists at all the nation’s major newspapers, magazines, and radio and TV networks and has written well over a thousand news releases and magazine articles on science and engineering over his career.

His scientific training as a chemist and biochemist coupled with his passion for communicating accurate scientific findings to the public led him to create and develop, with the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the international research and news service – EurekAlert! – which now links more than 4,500 journalists to news from 800 subscribing research institutions. The AAAS honored Meredith in 2007 by electing him as an AAAS Fellow “for exemplary leadership in university communications, and for important contributions to the theory and practice of research communications.”

Here are some of the other adventures that Meredith will share as his career unfolds: tramping across the California desert with seismologists recording microquakes for clues to the shifting crust; standing breathless atop a 14,000-foot Hawaiian mountain peak with astronomers breaking ground for an immense telescope to peer deeper into the cosmos than ever before, and watching a 50-foot research balloon, looking like a giant quivering jellyfish, soar into space carrying an instrument to detect gamma rays from distant astronomical objects.

Join Dr. Arlene as she uncovers what really goes on behind the curtain of science and what people need to know about scientific breakthroughs.

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