I chose the motto Create.Connect.Convey for C3 Science because all these activities are integral to effective science communication. I have been working in science communication more than 25 years and started C3 Science in 2011 to formalize and promulgate what I have learned. I hold a veterinary degree from Tufts University, a Master of Fine Arts from The Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and a BA from Princeton University. My education and training are highly interdisciplinary, a fact that is essential to what I do. My training as a writer is as important as my training as a scientist. I also am an award-winning fiction writer and have published my science journalism in numerous nationally distributed magazines and journals.
I have a broad background in health services research after working for 7 years at Kaiser Permanente Northwest’s Center for Health Research. I am on the faculty of the OHSU-Portland State University School of Public Health and am funded half time on a large NIH-funded research project, BUILD EXITO, whose goal is to increase diversity of the biomedical workforce.
My own research focuses on conservation medicine and on zoonotic (from nonhuman animals to humans) disease transmission. Conservation medicine strives to understand the ways in which human health, changes to the environment, and the health of nonhuman species, interact. Substantial scientific research shows the well-being of all species is interconnected, and that environmental perturbations have significant effects on human health and on the health of all other species.
My research projects include: being a co-investigator on the Bighorn Sheep Disease project, examining disease dynamics of pneumonia in bighorn sheep. I helped create the website www.bighornhealth.org to disseminate the findings and methods of this study to a wide variety of audiences. I have also researched and written about several bat viruses transmissible to humans; sampled livestock in Nepal for bovine brucellosis and tuberculosis, and surveyed farmers about their understanding of these diseases; researched canine rabies in Nepal; and helped write and formulate policy papers about the spread of brucellosis and other zoonotic diseases that cycle between humans, wildlife, and livestock in the Rocky Mountain west. I have worked extensively on snowshoe hare demographics in Montana, and assisted with a long-term study of marmots in Olympic National Park.
As a veterinary student, I was one of the founding investigators of a large-scale, on-going research project started at Tufts University, whose goal was to formulate and implement a national plan of rabies control for Nepal. Nepal has a significant incidence of human, canine, and wildlife rabies.
I was a regular contributor to Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment for many years. I have published in Orion, Open Spaces, Conservation Magazine, and other places. I have taught at the University of Iowa, at Chulalongkorn University in Thailand, and traveled in China, Japan, Thailand, Indonesia, Africa, Mexico, New Zealand, and Australia.
