The ScienceBlogs Book Club

The Contributors

These bloggers, writers, and pundits have been panelists at hosted discussions on the ScienceBlogs Book Club.

Video Book Reviews:

Joanne Manaster
Joanne Manaster is an instructor in two departments at the University of Illinois-Urbana: Bioengineering and Cell and Developmental Biology. She trains students in techniques of mammalian cell culture and concepts of tissue engineering as well as discussing the role of stem cells in tissue engineering and regenerative medicine. She also teaches histology courses. She is involved in numerous outreach activities for the general public and young people, and her website, Joanne Loves Science, acts as a clearinghouse for some of her thoughts related to stem cells, tissue engineering, science and beauty, famous scientists and, of course, popular science books, which she reviews in video format in a relaxed, intelligent and positive style so these books have a shot at being cracked open by either the reluctant science reader or science enthusiast. For years, Joanne kept secret the fact that she was an international model for fear of not being taken seriously as scientist, but figures that 20 years of lecturing and coordinating advanced laboratory courses gives her more than enough intellectual credibility to finally “fess up.” Adding to the tapestry that is her life, Joanne has four wonderful children and is also an accomplished seamstress/costume designer.

Autism's False Prophets Edition:

Kristina Chew
Kristina Chew, PhD, is a professor of Classics at Saint Peter's College in Jersey City, New Jersey. Since the spring of 2006, she has been writing Autism Vox, which covers the latest about news, research, treatments, education, books and much more about autism, as well as the latest about her 11-year-old son, Charlie. Chew has published a translation of the poet Virgil's Georgics (a long poem about agriculture in ancient Rome) and a number of essays about autism and the representation of disabilities in literature and popular culture. She is currently writing a book about language and neurodiversity and also translating Virgil's Eclogues (shorter poems about poetry and the pastoral life). She especially thanks Hsien-Hsien Lei of EyeonDna.com for helping her get Autism Vox started, and for introducing her to ScienceBlogs.

Kev Leitch
Kev Leitch is a web developer, married with three children. His middle child is severely autistic with associated learning difficulties. When she was diagnosed in 2003, Kev initially was a firm believer in the idea that vaccines caused autism and he turned to blogging as a way of not only voicing his concerns but also to chart the development of his daughter. Very soon after that time, it became increasingly clear to him from reading the science on the subject that vaccines had had no part to play in his daughter's autism, and in line with his increasing scepticism, he began to blog on the latest science and news surrounding autism research. Kev has been interviewed on the subject of autism numerous times including by Nature Medicine, Nature Neuroscience, New Scientist and The Guardian.

Paul Offit
Paul A. Offit, MD is the Chief of the Division of Infectious Diseases and the Director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. In addition, Dr. Offit is the Maurice R. Hilleman Professor of Vaccinology and a Professor of Pediatrics at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. He is a recipient of many awards including the J. Edmund Bradley Prize for Excellence in Pediatrics from the University of Maryland Medical School, the Young Investigator Award in Vaccine Development from the Infectious Disease Society of America, and a Research Career Development Award from the National Institutes of Health. Dr. Offit has published more than 130 papers in medical and scientific journals in the areas of rotavirus-specific immune responses and vaccine safety. He is also the co-inventor of the rotavirus vaccine, RotaTeq, recently recommended for universal use in infants by the CDC; for this achievement Dr. Offit received the Gold Medal from the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia and the Jonas Salk Medal from the Association for Professionals in Infection Control and Epidemiology. Dr Offit was also a member of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and is the author of four books titled Vaccines: What You Should Know (Wiley, 2003, 3rd Edition), Breaking the Antibiotic Habit (Wiley, 1999), The Cutter Incident: How America's First Polio Vaccine Led to Today's Growing Vaccine Crisis (Yale University Press, 2005), and, most recently, Vaccinated: One Man's Quest to Defeat the World's Deadliest Diseases (HarperCollins, 2007). A fifth book, titled Autism's False Prophets: Bad Science, Risky Medicine, and the Search for a Cure was published by Columbia University Press in September 2008.

Robert Park
Robert Park is Professor and former Chair of Physics of the University of Maryland. Following service in the Korean War as an Air Force electronics officer, he graduated in Physics at the University of Texas. He was named the Edgar Lewis Marston Fellow in Physics at Brown University, where he earned his PhD. Author of more than a hundred technical papers on the structure of crystal surfaces, he divided his time for twenty years between the University of Maryland and serving as the Washington, D.C. spokesman for American physics. A frequent guest on television news and author of controversial news commentaries, he received the 1995 Joseph Burton Award of the American Physical Society for Informing the Public on Issues of Science and Society. In 2008 he was awarded the Philip J. Klass Award of National Capital Area Skeptics. He posts a widely-read weekly electronic column 'What's New by Bob Park' on the internet and authored two bestselling books, Voodoo Science: the Road from Foolishness to Fraud, and Superstition: Belief in the Age of Science.

Orac
Orac is the nom de blog of a pseudonymous surgeon/scientist who authors the blog Respectful Insolence on ScienceBlogs.com. Orac shares his name with a cranky and arrogant computer from a 30-year-old British science-fiction television show called Blake's 7. At Respectful Insolence, he blogs about a wide range of topics, focusing most frequently on medicine and quackery, science and pseudoscience, and history and pseudohistory.

Microcosm Edition:

John Dennehy
John Dennehy is an evolutionary ecologist and a professor at Queens College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Research in the Dennehy lab focuses on the evolution of emerging infectious diseases and the evolution of life history variation using bacteriophages (parasites of bacteria) as model organisms. Dr. Dennehy has published articles in Evolution, Ecology Letters, The American Naturalist and The Quarterly Review of Biology. One of these papers was the subject of a Science Times article by Carl Zimmer. Dr. Dennehy maintains a blog at The Evilutionary Biologist.

PZ Myers
PZ Myers is a professor of biology at the University of Minnesota, Morris, where he specializes in evolution and development -- the hot new field known as evo-devo, which tries tease apart the complementary interactions of evolution and development. He writes professionally for Seed magazine, where his column focuses on the strange and often counter-intuitive relationships between genes and the dynamic events of development. He is best known for his weblog, Pharyngula, which Nature magazine called the most popular science weblog on the planet. The weblog is a player in the culture wars, and much of the content addresses creationist claims and also promotes a New Atheist worldview. PZ Myers has been cited and quoted in the fund-raising literature for the Discovery Institute, and along with Eugenie Scott and Richard Dawkins, was one of the featured militant atheists in the new Ben Stein propaganda movie for the Intelligent Design movement, Expelled. PZ likes to think of himself as having a second job as a boogeyman for creationists, and he has lectured all over the country on communicating science, on new revelations in evolutionary biology, and on the hilarious misconceptions of creationists. Another theme in his writing is an appreciation of the natural world, promoting the value of biological diversity...especially of interesting and exotic invertebrates...and especially molluscs...and especially cephalopods. Rumors of romantic entanglements with nubile squid are, however, entirely false, as he will cheerfully explain in explicit detail and at length.

Jessica Snyder Sachs
Jessica Snyder Sachs is a contributing editor to Popular Science and Parenting magazines and writes regularly for Discover, National Wildlife, and other national publications. Prior to becoming a full-time freelance writer, she managed and edited Science Digest. Sachs recently published her second book for the general reader, Good Germs, Bad Germs: Health and Survival in a Bacterial World, winner of the Fund for Investigative Journalism's annual book award. Good Germs, Bad Germs explores our emerging understanding of the bacterial ecosystems that imbue a healthy human body and how their disruption can lead to inflammatory disorders and drug-resistant infections. She continues the discussion on her blog, www.jessicasachs.com. Jessica's first book, Corpse, looked at the dynamic ecosystem of insects, plants, and bacteria that colonize the body after death. Subtitled "Nature, Forensics, and the Struggle to Pinpoint Time of Death," Corpse describes the 200-year pursuit of an accurate postmortem clock and features the casework of the world's leading forensic entomologists, botanists, and anthropologists.

Carl Zimmer
The New York Times Book Review calls Carl Zimmer "as fine a science essayist as we have." In his books, essays, and articles, Zimmer reports from the frontiers of biology, where scientists are expanding our understanding of life. He is a frequent guest on radio programs, such as Fresh Air and This American Life. He also lectures regularly at universities, medical schools, and museums. Zimmer's books include Soul Made Flesh, a history of the brain; Evolution: The Triumph of an Idea; At the Water's Edge, a book about major transitions in the history of life; The Smithsonian Intimate Guide to Human Origins; and Parasite Rex. In addition to writing books, Zimmer contributes articles to the New York Times, as well as magazines including National Geographic, Discover, Scientific American, Science, and Popular Science. He also writes an award-winning blog, The Loom. From 1994 to 1998 Zimmer was a senior editor at Discover, where he remains a contributing editor. He has won fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. He lives in Connecticut with his wife Grace and his children, Charlotte and Veronica.