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For nearly a decade, I served as Senior Editor and science writer in the Office of Public Affairs at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois. Fermilab is home to the Tevatron, the world’s highest-energy particle collider until the Large Hadron Collider began operations at CERN in Switzerland. I wrote about particle physics and physicists almost daily, in print and on the web. Fermilab’s original twice-monthly publication, FermiNews, was succeeded in 2004 by “symmetry magazine,” published jointly with Stanford Linear Accelerator Center in California.
FermiNews, which I edited for more than five years, won a 2002 Silver Trumpet Award from the Publicity Club of Chicago for its “significant contribution to public communication.” “symmetry” brought home a Golden Trumpet Award in 2006 from the PCC. As Executive Editor, I helped design and launch “symmetry” and wrote for it regularly. Along the way, I interviewed many renowned physicists, including Nobel Laureates Leon Lederman and James Cronin. And I’ve spoken with the winners of other prestigious physics and astrophysics prizes, such as Saul Perlmutter of Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory. Perlmutter led the Supernova Cosmology Project, which discovered evidence in 1998 for the accelerating expansion of the Universe (along with Australia’s High-Z Supernova Search team).
Since taking an early retirement from Fermilab, I have written several articles for the website Foundational Questions in Physics and Cosmology and recently completed a book for younger readers on The Big Bang. Writing about science is the culmination of a career of more than 35 years in journalism, including 12 years as a sportswriter at The Chicago Sun-Times. I covered professional hockey at The Sun-Times, so my career has taken me from hockey pucks to particle physics – and beyond, with my contributions to Suite 101.
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