Rosalind Reid

Senior Advisor

Council for the Advancement of Science Writing

Rosalind Reid, elected to the CASW Board in 2007, served as CASW’s program director 2012-13 before succeeding Ben Patrusky as executive director. She retired from that post in September 2024 and is now senior advisor to Executive Director Meaghan Parker. Reid was editor-in-chief of American Scientist, the interdisciplinary magazine of Sigma Xi, The Scientific Research Society, from 1992 to 2008. Recruited by the Harvard Initiative in Innovative Computing to co-organize the MIT/Harvard Image and Meaning workshop series on visual communication of science, she left the magazine to manage the Initiative and then help launch the Institute for Applied Computational Science at Harvard’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, serving as IACS founding executive director from 2010 to 2013. She continues her affiliation with Harvard as an associate of the Harvard Kennedy School and an editor for the Public Interest Tech Lab. Reid was a reporter for newspapers in Maine and North Carolina before learning the science beat as a research news editor at North Carolina State University and joining the American Scientist editorial staff in 1990. She holds degrees in journalism, political science, and public policy sciences from Syracuse and Duke. A member of the National Association of Science Writers, she has served on awards committees for the National Science Board and the American Institute of Physics. The first journalist to serve as Journalist in Residence at the Kavli Institute of Theoretical Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara, she is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and an honorary member of Sigma Xi and the Society of Integrative and Comparative Biology. Internationally she serves on the Board of Directors of InquireFirst, which provides training for journalists across Latin America; the Advisory Board for the Science Journalism Forum; and the Advisory Committee for the 2023 World Conference of Science Journalists. Reid co-organized the 2017 World Conference of Science Journalists and has worked with the CASW Board to launch CASW's Science Journalism Initiative, a growing suite of programs that aim to increase the quality, diversity, and sustainability of science journalism. She has also worked with the ComSciCon organization to create ComSciCon-SciWri, which brings young scientists interested in science writing to the ScienceWriters meeting for a workshop and professionally mentored writing experiences.