Jonathan D. Beard, Staff Writer - has been a journalist since 1981, when he left his job as a librarian at Columbia University. He performs many tasks for several publications, and will consider anything journalistic so long as he does not have to go to the office, wear a tie, or supervise anyone. He reports on science and technology, and reviews books for New Scientist and The Alchemist, a column in BioMedNet's companion site ChemWeb. He translates news articles from nine languages into English for World Press Review, and does photo research for Illustreret Videnskab, the leading science monthly in Scandinavia. When he reads for pleasure, it is military history. If he could, he would live in Tucson, but his wife keeps him in the Upper West Side of Manhattan.
Catherine Belling, Poetry Editor - is from South Africa. She is a graduate student in English literature at the State University of Stony Brook, writing her dissertation on representations of the heart in Renaissance drama, while teaching and doing research in the Division of Medicine in Society at Stony Brook's School of Medicine. She also manages the division's Web site.
David Bradley, Staff Writer - lives on the edge of Silicon Fen north of Cambridge, United Kingdom. Occasionally finds himself in the lotus position, guitar or beer in hand. More often he will be writing in his home office, where he generates literally tens of thousands of words a year to keep his 4.5-year-old son in ice cream and his 18-month daughter in disposable diapers. He is the weekly Catalyst columnist on The Alchemist, and has contributed to countless magazines and newspapers including Science, New Scientist, American Scientist, Popular Science, The Telegraph, and The Guardian, as well as adding chemistry to A Brief History of Science, published by Ivy Press in 1998. He is a chemist by training and a science writer-editor of ten years.
George W. Chacko, Software Editor - is a postdoctoral fellow at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. His training includes basic and advanced degrees in veterinary medicine and a Ph.D. in biochemistry and immunology. His research interests include signaling by antigen receptors, imaging signaling events in real time, and complexity in biology. Other interests include laboratory automation, fiddling endlessly with computers, and the alto saxophone.
Dean A. Haycock, Staff Writer and Book Editor - is a freelance journalist and science writer. His articles have appeared in BioWorld Today, The Gale Encyclopedia of Science, Environmental Health Perspectives, The American Chemical Society's Reaction Times, Upstate New Yorker magazine, The NIH NCRR Reporter, The Saratoga Business Journal, The Glens Falls Post-Star, Arriving magazine, newspapers of the Copley News Service, and professional journals. He is a consultant for The American Institutes for Research and Integrated Strategic Information Services, the exclusive North American partner of the European Center for Economic Research and Strategy Consulting. He received his Ph.D. in neuroscience from Brown University in 1986.
Josh Karpf, Supervising Copy Editor - edited Del Rey science fiction at Random House, and then science fact at the reference publisher Facts On File. Now he edits for HMS Beagle. He also designs volunteer-group Web sites. He is HMS Beagle's official carnivore.
Jim Kling, Staff Writer - in a short two years, Jim Kling traveled from the Indiana University Department of Chemistry; to New York City; to El Paso, Texas; and to Bellingham, Washington, where he currently resides in the shadows of a dormant volcano and the Cascades mountain range. He writes about science and business for publications like Inc., Science, Scientific American, Nature Biotechnology, and newsletters of the Harvard Business School. His journey and his writings are chronicled on his Web site.
Mike May - the contributing Web Resources editor of HMS Beagle had been working for the past seven years as associate editor at American Scientist magazine, where he was also involved in planning a Web site review section. He has written articles for journals including Science, Natural History, and New Scientist. He received his Ph.D. in neurobiology and behavior from Cornell University.
Amy Nadel, Production Manager - has been producing most of her life, most recently at Current Protocols. Page layout, graphics design, and databases are her areas of expertise. A self-avowed technology addict, she creates original clothing designs with a sewing machine that has a hard drive and hooks up to her computer via parallel port. Her most original products are her son and daughter. For science fun, she kills strain after strain of yeast in desperate attempts to make sourdough bread.
Tabitha M. Powledge, Staff Writer - did bioethics and science policy at the Hastings Center, then became a senior editor at what is now Nature Biotechnology and later founding editor of The Scientist. Her articles have appeared in periodicals famous and obscure, material and virtual, and she is the author of Your Brain: How You Got It and How It Works (Scribners, 1995). Powledge writes technical stuff for the Human Genome Project and rewrites nontechnical stuff as a contributing editor for Issues in Science and Technology, the policy quarterly of the National Academy of Sciences. Despite these blatant Washington connections, she claims to live far from the Beltway, on a serene Maryland inlet called Cuckold Creek. She joined HMS Beagle in the mistaken belief that it was a South American ecotourism cruise.
Charlie Schick, Software Editor - is a biochemist and molecular biologist at Children's Hospital in Boston. His interests include protein-protein interactions and proteinase inhibitor biology. Always looking for a better way to analyze and model his data, he has always been interested in programs capable of nonlinear regression and sophisticated data analysis. Though his religion is Macintosh, he couldn't pass up the opportunity to test-drive the newest version of SigmaPlot for Windows. He survived. He is currently an instructor in pediatrics at the Harvard Medical School, in the Division of Newborn Medicine.
Joel Shurkin, Staff Writer - a freelance writer living somewhere in the Santa Cruz mountains of California. He is rarely seen or heard outside of the Internet. He apparently worked as science editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer and science writer for Stanford University for several years, and is the author of eight books on science history. He is on the board of the National Association of Science Writers and shows up annually for the meeting.
Barbara Sullivan, Writer/Editor - has worked in the science-publishing field for ten years, primarily as an editor and writer. She has also been involved in the areas of managing editing, marketing, and author representation. Previously, she worked in development, first for a child-care center, and then for a nonprofit theater. She occasionally performs as an actress and singer on stage in New York City.
Randall Watson, Copy Editor (Daily Updates) - when he's not occupied waiting for Web pages to download, he also works for the Arts and Sciences Humanities Center at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, where his duties include teaching faculty seminars in Web design, as well as designing special Web projects for various departments. His weekends are reserved for Web design and consulting for commercial enterprises in eastern Nebraska. Any other free time is taken up with writing, recording, and playing songs in a power pop band called the/return. He received his Ph.D. in English from the University of Nebraska at Lincoln in 1999.
Lois Wingerson, Editor in Chief - began her science-journalism career at the University of Michigan's Mammalian Genetics Center, when she went to interview a professor who then hired her as a laboratory assistant. She has been a staff science writer for the magazines Discover and New Scientist and the newspaper Newsday, has written freelance articles for many other popular publications including the New York Times, Science News, and the Economist, and was a commissioned contributor to the Missouri Review's issue on science writing as a form of literature. Most recently an executive editor with the Healthcare Information Center at the business publisher Faulkner & Gray, she has also authored two books about genetic research, Mapping Our Genes (Dutton, 1990) and Unnatural Selection (Bantam, 1998). She lives in Brooklyn with her husband, son, and daughter.
Susan Wolsborn is Web designer of HMS Beagle.
Laurie Zamprelli-Pasiuk, Fiction/Humor Editor, Associate Production Editor - began her career as a production assistant in Elsevier Science's New York office. She joined the staff of HMS Beagle as an editorial assistant not long thereafter. With a never-ending drive to find the perfect plotline, she can usually be found reading anything and everything she can get her hands on. One of her favorite tasks is proofing HMS Beagle. She is currently pursuing her masters in publishing at Pace University. In her spare time she writes lots of short fiction and poetry.