NCSE is delighted to announce the addition of two new members to its staff.
Joshua Rosenau is NCSE's new Public Information Project Director, joining Susan Spath and replacing Nick Matzke. Rosenau comes to NCSE from the University of Kansas, where he was a graduate student in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology; he expects to complete and defend his dissertation on Modeling Limits on Species' Ranges by the end of 2007. In Kansas, he witnessed at first hand the antics of the creationist majority on the state board of education to undermine the treatment of evolution in the state science standards, and worked with the Kansas Coalition for Science and Kansas Citizens for Science to expose the problems with the majority's evolution-unfriendly version of the standards. His blog Thoughts from Kansas -- which will have to be renamed now! --is part of the popular ScienceBlogs collection run by the publishers of Seed magazine, and he belongs to the National Association of Science Writers. At NCSE, he will be working to help parents, teachers, and citizens in general who are facing challenges to evolution education in their communities; he will also be helping to improve NCSE's communication with the public and the press.
Anne D. Holden is NCSE's new Postdoctoral Scholar, replacing, after a hiatus, Alan Gishlick, who is now a visiting assistant professor in the Department of Geology at Gustavus Adolphus College. Holden comes to NCSE from the University of California, Berkeley, where she was a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Integrative Biology, working with Leslea Hlusko; she earned her PhD in biological anthropology from Cambridge University, with a dissertation entitled Sahara Passage: The Post-Glacial Re-colonization of North Africa by Mitochondrial L Haplotypes and its Role in Modern African Genetic Diversity. In addition to her scientific work, she is keenly interested in communicating science to the general public: a member of the National Association of Science Writers, her publications include essays published on-line in The Naked Scientists and Inklings. At NCSE, she will be helping to develop new educational and scientific resources and also, we hope, assisting in writing grants to enable NCSE to continue and expand its efforts to defend the teaching of evolution in the public schools.
Welcome aboard to both!