Ira Flatow, a veteran National Public Radio science correspondent and Emmy Award-winning television journalist, has covered stories in historic venues like the Kennedy Space Center, Three Mile Island, Antarctica and the South Pole.
And it all began during his boyhood when he burned down his mother’s bathroom while trying to recreate a biology class experiment
He’ll be bringing his experiences to campus Wednesday as a guest speaker in the McPherson Professorship lecture series.
He’s the host of NPR’s “Talk of the Nation: Science Friday,” and Flatow’s lecture will be titled “If it Breeds, It Leads: How the Media Bring Science to the Public.”
“He just hops around from physical to natural science and also public issues, like pesticides on tomatoes,” said Douglas Luckie, assistant professor of physiology at Lyman Briggs School.
The speech will be the fifth and final of the McPherson Professorship lectures - a series that MSU President M. Peter McPherson and his wife Joanne established earlier this year to show students the ways science shapes society.
The series was set up by the McPhersons after receiving an anonymous $2 million donation earlier this year. The lecture series is also tied in with Natural Science 491, Science Changing Society, a course offered to all undergraduate students at MSU. Visiting lecturers address the public and give a lecture to the class the next day.
Flatow will speak at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday in the Auditorium’s Fairchild Theatre.
Luckie said Flatow will perfectly cap off the semester’s seminar series, which has featured lectures by high-profile scientists such as Stephen Jay Gould and Ruth Hubbard.
Flatow’s lecture will detail how scientific issues are disseminated and brought to the public’s attention, and he will address various areas brought up during the weeks.
“If you think of the series as a public understanding of science, this series is essentially McPherson’s effort to get an overall understanding of science,” Luckie said.
Flatow has won numerous awards, including the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s Westinghouse Science and Journalism Award. He’s the consultant for the Sciences Institute for Public Information and is the author of a number of publications.
