Quick Blogroll Update: Jennifer Frazer/Biodiversity edition
I’d like to draw y’all’s (got to love any opportunity for two apostrophes in a single word) attention to two new listings on the blogroll, both from the same blogger, Jennifer Frazer. Her science blog, centered on natural history in a modern biological frame, appears under this delightful name: The Artful Amoeba.
Jennifer is a glutton for punishment, so just to make sure that she has enough to do she publishers her paeans to the satisfactions of the kitchen under this slightly clunkier moniker: Home Cooking Well.
Jennifer is one of those folks you brag about if you happen to be a teacher — and I wish I could claim a personal role in her success. I can’t, because she completed her master’s program in the MIT Graduate Program in Science Writing in 2004, just as I showed up as a part – timer. Now I run the joint and I couldn’t be happier to be able to call Jennifer one of ours — and she is kind enough to credit me with goading her into starting …Amoeba…
She’s a fine writer — freelancing now in Boulder after starting her career as a small-town newspaper reporter at the Wyoming Tribune-Eagle — and a knowledgeable one, having completed graduate work in microbiology plant pathology/mycology at Cornell, her MIT degree, and a delightful thesis for that program singing the praises (not really) of mold.
Don’t just take my word for it. You can simply read her blog(s) to judge for yourself, or if you favor external validation, consider this: In 2007 Jennifer won one of the most serious prizes in science journalism, the AAAS Science Journalism Award for an investigation of a swarm of elk deaths in Wyoming.
For those of you keeping score — that’s less than three years after she completed the MIT program, which is, I believe a record for those hitting the real world after completing a science writing course. Something to consider for anyone thinking about such programs, as I am constrained to say as head of this one….
So check her out. Hire her if you need some free-lance writing…you couldn’t do better. And in the meantime, read what she has to say, and thus share her joy in the rigorous investigation of the natural world.
Image: Henri Rousseau, “Combat of a Tiger and a Buffalo” 1908-9
July 15, 2009 at 10:19 pm
[...] — and director of the Graduate Program in Science Writing at my alma mater, MIT — has kindly featured my blogs on his with some warm words for yours truly. Thank you, [...]
July 15, 2009 at 10:35 pm
Thanks, Tom, for the kind words. : )
July 16, 2009 at 9:54 am
Yeah, I wish I could claim credit for her too! She’s a force of nature.