I’ve interviewed and profiled a wide range of individuals, from musicians to scientists. I currently profile Boston-area artists and public figures for Bostonist.com as well as politicians and authors for Great Neck Publishing, a division of EBSCO. I’ve also profiled alumni for Reed College, where I earned my undergraduate degree.

Great Neck

For Great Neck, I’ve written profiles of political leaders, authors, and Nobel laureates. Persons profiled include George Tupou of Tonga, Toomas Hendrik Ilves of Estonia, Vladimir Voronin of Moldova, Nobel laureate Osamu Shimomura, Elvin Ernesto Santos of Honduras, and more. These biographies involve extensive research, fact-checking, and are heavily vetted by EBSCO editors. Here’s an excerpt of my profile of Shimomura, who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work with green fluorescent protein (GFP).

Green fluorescent protein glows green under ultraviolet light and needs no additives to glow. GFP can be added to individual cells in order to track their activity or tag organisms as possessing specific characteristics. It can also be genetically associated with specific proteins, such that when the protein is produced, GFP is as well, so that the protein in question glows and can be tracked. GFP has proven particularly useful in biology, and has been used to study cancer, Alzheimer’s, and much more. Use of the protein to track biological processes in living cells has revolutionized scientific knowledge of many different fields. Before the discovery of GFP, cellular processes could only be studied with stained cells, which marked a still moment in time. GFP allowed scientists to study cells in motion. The transition has been compared to one from photographs to video.

Bostonist

Among the many interviews I’ve done for Bostonist.com, I’m partial to this profile of Jeff Lieberman, who besides having his own Discovery Channel television show is a very cool individual.

MIT PhD student Jeff Lieberman is the star of the new Discovery Channel series Time Warp, which showcases everyday events in slow motion, then explains the science behind what we’re seeing. Lieberman is the science guy, revealing how everything works; his co-host Matt Kearney is the video guy, capturing activities in super slow motion. While the show covers many exciting occurrences, from car crashes to water balloons, it’s the motive behind the show—to motivate viewers to analyze what they observe—that’s even more enthralling, and Lieberman himself is clearly very invested in this motive. [full profile]

Reed College

I’ve also interviewed and profiled several alumni authors for the Reed College admission website. Here’s a sample of that work.

In 1966, Steven Shapin emerged from Reed College with a degree in biology but, after a year doing graduate work in genetics, he decided that a life in the laboratory was not for him. He then spent a little over a year working in Washington, D.C., on questions of science policy and the direction of scientific research, and was advised that, if he wanted to go on in this line of work, it “might be a clever idea” to get a Ph.D.-even though the subject of the Ph.D. didn’t seem to matter much to people in the field. Shapin considered various sociology, public administration, government, and other types of departments, and finally came across the University of Pennsylvania’s History of Science program. He’d been interested in the history of government policy toward science and thought the program might be a good match for him. At the time, history of science programs were relatively new; they’d emerged after World War I and several were in existence by the 1950s. Harvard, where Shapin now works, established the first history of science program in the U.S. [full profile]