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Sound Science Symposium

Join us for a special event on how to get the sound and the science right in STEM podcast and broadcast reporting.

Sound Science will feature two panels and a mingle with special guests, including: Undiscovered producer and host Annie Minoff, The Great God of Depression producer and host Pagan Kennedy, Orbital Path producer and sound designer David Schulman, WBUR CommonHealth editor Carey Goldberg, NOVA Digital Production Assistant Ana Aceves, NOVA Senior Digital Producer Ari Daniel, and award-winning author and journalist David Baron.

This free event is open to current science podcasters as well as those new to science reporting.

This program is made possible through funding from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and will be hosted by PRX's Genevieve Sponsler and Science Editor Andrea Mustain.

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

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David Schulman is creator of the Musicians in their own Words series; he’s produced scores of sound-rich features airing nationally on public radio. He is the producer and sound designer of the PRX podcast Orbital Path with Michelle Thaller.  While senior producer of BBC Americana, he once produced a segment that pitted a seasoned BBC presenter against a monosyllabic 10-year-old in a game of radio chess (the 10-year-old won).

As a composer, David has created original scores for performances by Oregon Ballet Theater and theme music for NPR’s “The Big Listen.” David has won two national CPB grants and the Best Documentary: Silver Award from the Third Coast International Audio Festival. A recent piece for Australia’s ABC RN — “Playing the Casals Cello” — was nominated for the 2017 Prix Italia.

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Carey Goldberg covers health and science, and is the host of WBUR's CommonHealth blog. She has been the Boston bureau chief of The New York Times, a staff Moscow correspondent for The Los Angeles Times, and a health/science reporter for The Boston Globe. She was a Knight Science Journalism fellow at MIT; graduated summa cum laude from Yale; and did graduate work at Harvard. She is co-author of the triple memoir "Three Wishes: A True Story Of Good Friends, Crushing Heartbreak and Astonishing Luck On Our Way To Love and Motherhood."

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Pagan Kennedy tells stories about iconoclasts, humanitarian inventors, and scientific visionaries. Her eleven books include The First Man-Made Man, a study of the transgender pioneer Michael Dillon.  Kennedy's journalism has appeared in dozens of publications including The New York Times Magazine, where she wrote the "Who Made That?" column.  In the 1980s and '90s, she created a 'zine called Pagan's Head that anticipated today's self-produced samizdat -- and was named the Queen of 'Zines by Wired Magazine. She is now a contributing writer for the New York Times Opinion section; she is also co-producing a serial podcast for the Radiotopia network.  

As a Knight Science Journalism Fellow at MIT in 2010-11, Kennedy studied microbiology and neuroengineering.  She has won numerous other awards including an NEA fellowship, a Smithsonian fellowship, and two Massachusetts Cultural Council fellowships. 

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Ana Aceves is currently a Digital Production Assistant at NOVA PBS. There, she works on all things digital—from producing videos and curating content for NOVA’s various social media platforms to writing for its online magazine and managing its website. She enjoys telling stories at the intersection of science and everyday experiences, especially when they empower women and minorities.

Aceves earned her Bachelors’ Degree in astrophysics and media studies from UC Berkeley and then went on to pursue a Masters’ in Science Journalism from Boston University. When she’s not working, she’s either streaming TV shows, baking, or salsa dancing.

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David Baron is a journalist, author, and broadcaster who has spent his thirty-year career largely in public radio. He has worked as an environment correspondent for NPR, science reporter for WBUR, and science editor for PRI’s The World, and he is a three-time recipient of the annual journalism prize from the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Now a scholar in residence at the University of Colorado’s Center for Environmental Journalism, David has turned to writing books. His latest, American Eclipse, was a finalist for the 2018 PEN/E. O. Wilson Prize for Literary Science Writing.

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Ari Daniel has always been drawn to science and the natural world. As a kid, he packed his green Wildlife Treasury box full of species cards. As a graduate student, Ari trained gray seal pups (Halichoerus grypus) for his Master’s degree at the University of St. Andrews, and helped tag wild Norwegian killer whales (Orcinus orca) for his Ph.D. at MIT and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.

These days, as Senior Digital Producer for NOVA and an independent science reporter for outlets including public radio, Ari works with a species he’s better equipped to understand – Homo sapiens. He has reported on science topics across five continents. He is a co-recipient of the AAAS Kavli Science Journalism Gold Award for his radio stories on glaciers and climate change in Greenland and Iceland. Ari also co-produces the Boston branch of Story Collider, a live storytelling show about science.

In the fifth grade, Ari won the “Most Contagious Smile” award.

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Annie Minoff is co-host and producer of the Undiscovered podcast. She also plays the banjo. Prior to Undiscovered, Annie produced stories about science and the arts for Science Friday and wrangled rock stars for WBEZ’s Sound Opinions. Her work’s been heard on Planet Money, Studio 360, and ABC’s Sum of All Parts.