Science, Health &
Environmental Reporting

Dan Fagin is the director of the Science, Health and Environmental Reporting Program, in which he teaches Environmental Reporting and Current Topics in Science, Health and Environmental Journalism. He is also the founder and director of the Science Communication Workshops at NYU.

Awarded the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction, Dan’s latest book, Toms River: A Story of Science and Salvation, was described by The New York Times as “a new classic in science reporting.” A Times bestseller, Toms River also won the New York Public Library’s Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism, the National Academy of Sciences’ Communication Award and the Society of Environmental Journalists’ Rachel Carson Book Award. Toms River was included in several lists of the best books of the year, including by NPR, which described Toms River as a “gripping, page-turning environmental thriller,” and by Kirkus Reviews, which called it “fascinating” and “hard-hitting.” Two Chinese language editions of Toms River were published in 2015, and it was named a Book of the Year by the Beijing News and the China Times.

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Jeff DelViscio teaches video storytelling at SHERP. He is currently Chief Multimedia Editor/Executive Producer at Scientific American where he directs documentary, animation, social video and podcasts. He is a founding editor and former director of multimedia and creative at STAT, where he oversaw all visual, audio and interactive journalism. He previously spent eight years at The New York Times, where he worked on five different desks across the paper. He holds dual master’s degrees from Columbia University in journalism and in earth and environmental sciences. He has worked aboard oceanographic research vessels and tracked money and politics in science from Washington, D.C. He was a Knight Science Journalism Fellow at MIT in 2018-19.

Lindsay Gellman, who teaches the Reporting II workshop at SHERP, writes about health, technology, business, and culture. Her work has been featured in The Wall Street Journal, where she was a staff reporter, as well as The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, New York Magazine, Bloomberg Businessweek, WIRED, National Geographic, Los Angeles Review of Books, British Vogue, and on National Public Radio’s All Things Considered. Her investigative reporting on unscrupulous medical businesses has been supported by the National Institute for Health Care Management Foundation and the Knight Science Journalism Fellowship at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She was a visiting scholar in NYU Langone’s Division of Medical Ethics, where her research focused on the medical ethics of unproven treatments for chronic conditions. She is an editor at The Dial, a new online magazine with a global focus.

Lindsay previously taught nonfiction writing as a lecturer in Yale University’s English Department. She has also contributed investigative research to bestselling journalistic book projects, including Ronan Farrow’s Catch and Kill and Brad Stone’s Amazon Unbound, and to development work for documentary films. Lindsay spent a year in Berlin as a Fulbright scholar covering technology startups and the arts. While in Germany, she also reported on exploitative cancer clinics. Her reporting was published in German and English, and triggered a law-enforcement investigation and changes to crowdfunding-platform policies. She earned a B.A. with distinction in English at Yale.

Robin Marantz Henig, who teaches the Reporting 1 workshop and the summer class in journalism ethics, has written scores of magazine and newspaper articles and nine books, most recently Twentysomething: Why Do Young Adults Seem Stuck? (co-authored with her daughter Samantha Henig). Her previous book, Pandora’s Baby: How the First Test Tube Babies Sparked the Reproductive Revolution, was named Book of the Year by the American Society of Journalists and Authors, and won the Science in Society Award of the National Association of Science Writers. Robin’s articles have appeared regularly in The New York Times Magazine, where she is a Contributing Writer, as well as in National Geographic, Scientific American, Smithsonian, and just about every woman’s magazine in the grocery store. She writes book reviews and opinion pieces for The New York Times, The Washington Post, and BookForum, and writes about grandparenthood for The Atlantic website. From 1997 to 2002 she was a member of the board of contributors of USA Today. She served for ten years on the board of directors of the National Association of Science Writers, was its president in 2014-2016, and was co-editor of its Field Guide for Science Writers.

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Rachel Nuwer is the internship professor and freelance advisor at NYU SHERP. She has been a freelance science journalist since 2012 and regularly contributes to the New York Times, Scientific American, Nature and more. She is also an award-winning author. Her most recent book, I Feel Love: MDMA and the Quest for Connection in a Fractured World, explores the history, science, culture and politics of the psychedelic drug MDMA, and was named a best book of 2023 by Amazon and Scientific American. Her first book, Poached: Inside the Dark World of Wildlife Trafficking, published in 2018, took her around the world to investigate the multi-billion dollar international illegal wildlife trade. She holds master’s degrees in science journalism from SHERP and applied ecology from the University of East Anglia. An avid traveller, Rachel has been to 80 countries and counting.

Ivan Oransky, MD, Distinguished Writer In Residence, has taught medical reporting in the Science, Health, and Environmental Reporting Program since 2002. He is editor in chief of The Transmitter and co-founder of Retraction Watch, a site that reports on scientific integrity, fraud, and other issues. The site’s work has been cited by news outlets including The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post, and in 2020 it was named one of NewsGuard’s “Unsung Heroes” who “are models in producing content that is truthful, compelling, credible, and transparent.”

Ivan previously was vice president of editorial at Medscape, global editorial director of MedPage Today, executive editor of Reuters Health, and held editorial positions at Scientific American and The Scientist. A 2012 TEDMED speaker, he is the recipient of the 2015 John P. McGovern Medal for excellence in biomedical communication from the American Medical Writers Association, and in 2017 was awarded an honorary doctorate in civil laws from The University of the South (Sewanee). Ivan has also taught at the City University of New York Graduate School of Journalism and has written for publications from Nature to the New York Times. From 2017-2021, he served as president of the Association of Health Care Journalists.

John Rennie teaches Science Writing in the Science, Health and Environmental Reporting Program. Currently a deputy editor of Quanta Magazine, he served as editor in chief of Scientific American for almost 15 years and has been a member of its Board of Editors since 1989. In recent years, Rennie has also served as editorial director of McGraw-Hill Education’s online science reference AccessScience and has hosted the television series Hacking the Planet on The Weather Channel. He has also blogged at The Gleaming Retort for PLOS blogs and lectured widely about science topics, especially the life sciences, technology and ethical and cultural challenges of new discoveries. During his tenure at Scientific American, Rennie oversaw the modernization and expansion of that venerable magazine franchise to include new titles such as Scientific American Mind and assorted digital media. He edited the National Magazine Award-winning single-topic issues “What You Need to Know about Cancer” (Sept. 1996) and “A Matter of Time” (Sept. 2002). The Potomac Institute for Policy Studies honored him with its 2003 Navigator Award for distinguished service in support of national science and technology policy. He was also a recipient of the 2000 Sagan Award for Public Understanding of Science from the Council of Scientific Society Presidents.

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Before joining the Department of Journalism, Charles Seife was writer for Science magazine -specializing in physics and mathematics- and had been a U.S. correspondent for New Scientist. He holds an A.B. in mathematics from Princeton University, an M.S. in mathematics from Yale University, and an M.S. in journalism from Columbia University. His research interests include science and mathematics journalism.

Seife’s freelance work has appeared in The Economist, Scientific American, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Washington Post, The New York Times and other publications. He is also the author of Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea (2000), which won the 2000 PEN/Martha Albrand Award for First Nonfiction, as well as Alpha & Omega: The Search for the Beginning and End of the Universe (2003), Decoding the Universe: How the New Science of Information is Explaining Everything in the Cosmos, From Our Brains to Black Holes (2005), Sun in a Bottle: The Strange History of Fusion and the Science of Wishful Thinking (2008), and the forthcoming Proofiness: The Dark Arts of Mathematical Deception (2010).

Blythe Terrell is an audio instructor for SHERP. She started her career in print, as a newspaper reporter and editor in Texas and Colorado, before earning her Master’s of Science in Public Health from Johns Hopkins. She then worked at FiveThirtyEight, as a general editor and then science and health editor, before moving to audio in 2017. Blythe is now supervising editor at Science Vs at Gimlet. In 2021, the show won a Gold Award from the AAAS Kavli Science Journalism Awards for its Covid-19 coverage.