Category: Mercury Magazine

I Dared a Mighty Thing: A Change in Career

On the one hand, I’m a little sad: I’ve stepped down as editor for the Astronomical Society of the Pacific‘s Mercury magazine and Mercury Online.

After nine issues of editing and producing Mercury, and over two-and-a-half fantastic years of working with the wonderful staff of the ASP, I was in my element doing something I loved. This was in addition to my freelance work with HowStuffWorks, Space.com, LiveScience.com, HISTORY.com, Scientific American and others, plus the science PR gigs I picked up along the way with TRIUMF and the University of Waterloo.

After the infamous Seeker.com layoffs of 2017 that gutted our original (and, frankly, awesome) Discovery News team, choosing to be a freelance science communicator was one heck of a reality check after nearly nine years of relative job security at Discovery. That said, the past three years have also been immensely rewarding, exposing me to a brilliant community of science writers from a myriad of fields, from high-energy physics to astrobiology to Earth sciences.

But when a job opportunity emerged at one of my favorite institutions last year, I couldn’t help but pay attention and apply. After convincing myself there was “no chance” that I’d land it… land it I did.

So I’ve now traded in my freelancing for a scicomm career at…

[NASA/JPL-Caltech]

Having worked as a journalist and blogger, reporting on the incredible space robot adventures managed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory for the past 15 years, I’ve always pondered whether my career would wind up in an institution like NASA. And I’m overjoyed that it has.

It will be a new challenge working as a media relations specialist and writer at JPL’s communications team, but I think the time had come to evolve my career to a new level while still doing the thing I love at an institution I hold in high regard. Intimately knowing the pressures, challenges, and shortfalls facing writers in science media, I hope to use everything I’ve learned over the past 15 years to effectively communicate JPL’s work to the world.

A huge thank you to everyone who has supported me over the years; I am truly grateful and I hope to make you proud as I embark on this new journey.

The Winter 2018 Edition of Mercury Magazine Is Now Live!

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The front cover of the Winter 2018 edition of Mercury (vol. 47, No. 1)

As many of you know, I became editor of Mercury magazine last year and my first edition is now live!

Mercury is a publication by the Astronomical Society of the Pacific (ASP), an awesome non-profit organization based out of San Francisco that has been working for over 125 years to advance science education, science literacy and astronomy appreciation around the world. Mercury is a part of the ASP’s mission and has been in publication for members since 1972. I’m deeply honored that the ASP has entrusted me with the magazine.

The Winter 2018 edition, which can now be downloaded via the members’ portal, is packed with great articles and columns by astronomers, science writers and education professionals, tackling everything from the Event Horizon Telescope to how the Arecibo Observatory is recovering after Hurricane Maria. We also have more on gravitational waves and multimessenger astronomy, doomed dwarf galaxies, mysteries in the galactic halo, sunspot history, interstellar asteroids, how to teach astronomy in a world filled with misinformation and news from the ASP’s annual conference in St. Louis.

To read this edition and be involved in the ASP’s mission, you have to be a member, but for a sneak peek of what is waiting for you inside this quarter’s edition of Mercury and my first as editor, you can review the contents and read some select excerpts here.

I’m excited to embark on this new adventure and can’t wait to begin planning for the Spring edition!