KC Cole

KC Cole (born August 22, 1946 in Detroit ) is an American science journalist and writer . She is a professor at the University of Southern California .

Life

KC Cole grew up in Rio de Janeiro , Port Washington ( New York ) and Shaker Heights ( Ohio ). She graduated from Barnard College with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Political Science . She then worked at Radio Free Europe and lived in Czechoslovakia , the Soviet Union and Hungary . Upon her return to the United States, the New York Times Magazine published an article by Cole about the invasion of Czechoslovakia by Warsaw Pact troops. She then began writing regularly for the Saturday Review in San Francisco.

In 1972 she met Frank Oppenheimer on a visit to the Exploratorium in San Francisco , who aroused her interest in physical problems. In the mid-1970s she began writing scientific articles for several magazines, including the New York Times, The Washington Post , The New Yorker , Smithsonian Magazine , Esquire and Newsweek . She joined Discover and Newsday in the late 1970s .

Since 1994 she has been writing scientific articles for the Los Angeles Times , in which she has her own column Mind Over Matter . Her books on scientific topics, which have been written since the late 1990s, have been translated into several languages, including German, Spanish, Swedish, Chinese, Japanese and Korean. She is a scientific commentator for the NPR and the Southern California radio station KPCC.

KC Cole has taught Scientific Journalism at Yale University and Wesleyan University and is Professor of Science, Society and Communication at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles . She is a member of the Journalism and Women Symposium (JAWS) and was director of the PEN- West. In her home town of Santa Monica , she initiated Categorically Not! , a series of art, science, and politics conversations that has been taking place at the Santa Monica Art Studios since 2005.

KC Cole has received several awards and honors for her journalistic work. In 1995 she received the “Award for Best Science Writing” from the American Institute of Physics , and in 1996 and 1999 she received the “Award for Best Explanatory Journalism” from the Los Angeles Times. In 1998 she received the " Edward R. Murrow Award " from the Skeptics Society . Some of her work has been included in the annual volumes The Best American Science and Nature Writing (2002) and The Best American Science Writing (2004, 2005). In 2007 she was accepted as an honorary member of the Sigma Xi Scientific Association.

KC Cole has a son and a daughter.

Works

• What Only a Mother Can Tell You About Having a Baby . Anchor Press, Garden City 1980, ISBN 0-385-13513-0 .
• Between the lines. Searching for the space between feminism and femininity and other tight spots . Anchor Press / Doubleday, Garden City 1982, ISBN 0-385-17231-1 .
• Sympathetic vibrations. Reflections on Physics as a Way of Life . Morrow, New York 1984, ISBN 0-688-03968-5 .
• Why the clouds don't fall from the sky. From the ubiquity of physics . Structure, Berlin 2000, ISBN 3-351-02512-2 .
• The universe in a teacup. From the everyday magic of math . Structure of the Taschenbuch Verlag, Berlin 2001, ISBN 3-7466-8080-8 .
• A brief history of the universe . Structure, Berlin 2002, ISBN 3-351-02530-0 .
• Mind over matter. Conversations with the Cosmos . Harcourt, Orlando 2003, ISBN 0-15-100816-7 .

Quotes

About Frank Oppenheimer and the Exploratorium:

“I think the Exploratorium looks something like Frank's brain, a rather chaotic but profoundly linked combination of art, science, philosophy, education, politics and pure play.”
- Why the clouds don't fall from the sky. P. 247.

Others

The KS Cole Award given by the American Biophysical Society in honor of Kenneth Stewart Cole is also known as the KC Cole Award . This name does not go back to KC Cole, but to the nickname Kacy by Kenneth Stewart Cole, which also led to the use of the initials KC Cole for him.

Web links

• Literature by and about KC Cole in the catalog of the German National Library
• KC Cole on the University of Southern California website