Event

A celebration of the life of Prof. William E. Burrows (1937-2024)

Join us in person or online to remember our friend, colleague, and teacher, the esteemed journalist Bill Burrows. An RSVP is required for in-person attendees.

A great journalist with an irreverent sense of humor and a passion for digging, Bill wrote 14 books, most of them on space and aviation. He started out as a news clerk at the New York Times and went on to a successful career as a journalist for the Richmond Times-Dispatch, the Washington Post, the Times and the Wall Street Journal, rising to national prominence for his reporting on space exploration. His history of the space age, This New Ocean, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in History in 1999. Bill joined the NYU Journalism Department in 1974 and within six years was its chair. In 1982, he founded the first of our specialized programs, the Science and Environmental Reporting Program (now known as the Science, Health and Environmental Reporting Program). He retired in 2007 and was the first person at NYU Journalism to be granted the title of professor emeritus.

If you can join us in person, RSVP here by Sept. 5. For those who cannot join us in person, we will be livestreaming the event on this page.

Contributions in Bill’s memory may be made to the William E. Burrows SHERP Scholarship Fund. You can contribute here.

You can read more about Bill in this New York Times obituary. And here’s the story of how Bill founded SHERP.