Phil Hilts became in June 2008 the third director of the KSJtracker’s parent organization, the Knight Science Journalism Fellowships program at MIT founded in 1983 by Victor K. McElheny.

Hilts is the author of six books and, during a newspaper career that began in 1968, has won numerous prizes and has written more than 300 front page stories at The New York Times and The Washington Post. For The Times he broke the story of the cigarette industry’s 40-year cover-up of its own research showing that tobacco was harmful and addictive. His most recent book, Rx for Survival: Why We Must Rise to the Global Health Challenge, was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year.

His assignments have taken him to such disparate locales as a mile deep in the Pacific Ocean while aboard the submersible Alvin, and a Zambian village where a traditional healer was “curing” AIDS. His articles on the inaccuracy of hypnosis-induced court testimony led to four men being freed from jail.

Hilts is also the author of Protecting America’s Health: The FDA, Business, and One Hundred Years of Regulation. The only history of the Food and Drug Administration, it won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Science and Technology and was named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. He has been a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University and twice a fellow at the Harvard School of Public Health. He is also a commentator on health and science issues for National Public Radio.

Charles Petit is the Head Tracker (tagline -CP) for the Knight program’s blog that collects and links to a variety of science, environmental, and medical stories in the daily news.

Petit has been on the science and technology beat since 1970, including 26 years at the San Francisco Chronicle — which he joined after two years at the Livermore Herald and News. At The Chronicle he broke news that the universe is not only expanding, but is accelerating outward. He has been on assignment in the stratosphere, 3600 feet under the sea, the Arctic, and Antarctic. He joined the staff at U.S. News & World Report in 1998, and in 2005 became primarily a freelance writer. Recent articles have appeared in National Geographic, Smithsonian Magazine, Nature, US News & World Report, Science News, and The New York Times.

Awards include AAAS awards (for newspapers, and for magazines), the 2003 American Geophysical Union’s News Writing award, the 1991 American Institute of Physics prize, the 1990 Science-in-Society prize from the National Assoc. of Science Writers, and regional prizes from the American Heart Association and San Francisco Press Club. He is a former president of the National Association of Science Writers and of the Northern California Science Writers Association, has been an instructor at the Graduate School of Journalism at UC Berkeley, and is on the board of the Council for the Advancement of Science Writing. In 1984-85 he was a fellow at the Vannevar Bush program at MIT, which since has become the Knight Science Journalism Fellowships.

Paul Raeburn (-PR) is a biology and medical tracker.

Raeburn is a journalist, blogger, and broadcaster, and the author, most recently, of “Acquainted with the Night, a memoir of raising children with depression and bipolar disorder.” His new book, “Are Fathers Necessary? The new science of fatherhood,” will be published by Simon & Schuster in 2010.

From 1996-2003, Raeburn was the senior editor for science and technology at Business Week. Before that, he was the science editor and chief science correspondent at The Associated Press. He is also the organizer of the annual national writers’ conference New Horizons in Science, a recipient of the Science in Society award from the National Association of Science Writers, and a past president of NASW.

He blogs at Fathers and Families and Psychology Today.

Boyce Rensberger (-BR), former Director, Knight Science Journalism Fellowships (1998 to mid 2008), creator of KSJtracker and back-up Tracker.

Before taking over the Knight Fellowships in 1998, Rensberger was a science writer or science editor for more than 32 years, beginning in 1966 at The Detroit Free Press. From there he went to The New York Times from 1971 through 1979. He left The Times to freelance and to become head writer of a PBS science series for children, “3-2-1- Contact!” In 1981, he became senior editor of Science 81—Science 84 magazine. In 1984 Rensberger went to The Washington Post, where he served as science writer and science editor.He has written four books, most recently Life Itself: Exploring the Realm of the Living Cell. Rensberger has twice won the AAAS’s top award for science writing. He also teaches science journalism in MIT’s Graduate Program in Science Writing and is co-director of the Science Journalism Program at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole.

John D. Cox, back-up Tracker. (-JDC)

Cox is a veteran science writer who has focused on earth sciences, especially meteorology and climate. A member of the National Association of Science Writers, he was a 1995-96 Knight Science Journalism Fellow at MIT. He has worked for many years as a daily journalist in several bureaus in the western U.S. for United Press International, in London as an editor for Reuters Limited, and in California as a senior writer for The Sacramento Bee. He lives in Sacramento.

John is the author of three books. Climate Crash: Abrupt Climate Change and What it Means for Our Future, Joseph Henry Press, April 2005; Storm Watchers: The Turbulent History of Weather Prediction from Franklin’s Kite to El Niño, John Wiley & Sons, August 2002, and Weather for Dummies: A Reference for The Rest of Us, John Wiley & Sons, January 2000.

Pere Estupinyà (-PE) , Spanish language tracker ;

Estupinyà is a Chemist and Biochemist from Spain who, after a short time as a PhD researcher, moved to science journalism. He has been the editor of REDES, the leading Spanish television program on science, and lectured  in Science, Technology and Society at the Ramon Llull University.

In 2007-2008 he spent one academic year at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University as a Knight Science Journalism Fellow. He writes about science for different Spanish publications, collaborates on radio programs, gives conferences, and owns an acclaimed scientific blog in El Pais (link: http://lacomunidad.elpais.com/apuntes-cientificos-desde-el-mit/). He  lives in Washington DC while working at the National Institutes of Health and writing as a freelance journalist for various Spanish and US media outlets.  Pere says he is a scientific omnivore who writes about science as an excuse to learn more about, and enjoy, its wonders.