I'm a German-American Professor for International Science Communication & Crossmedia Journalism at Rhine-Waal University in Germany, occasional guest lecturer at the Department of Media and Communication (DMC) at Royal University of Phnom Penh, Cambodia, and trainer at the Deutsche Welle Academie, Germany’s leading organization for international media training.
I continue working as a science journalist and multimedia producer.
In early April 2020, I co-founded the Pandemic Silence Project, a global call to record the sounds of the Covid-19 pandemic shutdown to capture the quieting-down (or change) of the world's soundscapes. In the summer of 2019, I spent three months as the Journalist in Residence at HITS Heidelberg, Germany, where I gave a talk about how science journalists can deal with the challenges of fake news and the reproducibility crisis in science. In 2017/2018, I was a AAAS Science & Technology Diplomacy Fellow in Washington DC, advising the U.S. government on international genome editing regulatory policy.
I’ve won the the Grimme Online Award twice (the second time as part of RiffReporter), the VR NOW Award (as part of the Songbird team at The Guardian) as well as the European Newspaper Award, and have been nominated for the Georg von Holzbrinck science journalism award (twice, in 2017 and 2022) and for the GOLDENE KAMERA Digital Award, the acatech PUNKT award and the Webby Awards.
My writing has appeared in the anthologies Alice and Bob Meet the Wall of Fire (MIT Press 2018) and The Best American Science and Nature Writing, and I'm the author of the reporting and fact checking chapter in The Science Writers' Handbook, an introduction to science and freelance writing (Da Capo Press, 2013).
I have also explained science to 6 million prime time viewers on German national television (ARD), have produced pieces for German television and was an author/producer for the German TV production company Sichtzeit TV in Cologne.
My work as a freelance journalist has appeared in many American and European media outlets including Washington Post, Guardian, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, WIRED (online), Atlantic (online), Nautilus, Quanta Magazine, Nature, Science News, Prevention, Storybench, Cell, Austrian Public Radio ORF, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, DIE ZEIT, Rheinpfalz am Sonntag, Greenpeace Magazin (Germany) and Swiss SonntagsZeitung. I've edited for Nautilus magazine and others. Recent projects include a virtual reality project on the sound of extinct species with The Guardian, and shooting and editing video for a multimedia piece for DER SPIEGEL.
I've extensively covered HIV vaccine research, infectious diseases and global health from all over the world including India, Africa, China, Southeast Asia, South America, and Europe.
I trained as a print journalist at the Chicago Tribune (where I was a AAAS Mass Media Fellow), at Nature magazine, and at the University of California, Santa Cruz Science Communication Program; studied television production at ifp journalism school in Munich, Germany, and at the BRIC Arts | Media House in Brooklyn, NY; and learned data journalism at Boston University.
Before I became a journalist, I gave guided tours and over 100 lectures to explain the local wildlife and how environmental pollution affects the oceans on an island off the German coast, and studied biology at the Albert-Ludwigs Universität Freiburg (Germany), the University of Washington, Seattle and the University of California, Irvine. My studies of glow-in-the-dark transgenic frogs involved training in microarray technology and bioinformatics and led to a Ph.D. degree in developmental biology.