The team behind COSMOS, Australia’s #1 science media brand and winner of 35 awards.
Visit our MEDIA ROOM for news clippings, interviews and press releases about COSMOS. To submit articles or portfolios for consideration by the editors, visit the SUBMISSIONS page here.
Editor-in-Chief
Wilson da Silva is a former science reporter for ABC TV and served as a foreign correspondent for Reuters, working in Canada and Australia. He began his career as a staff journalist on The Sydney Morning Herald and later worked as a technology writer for The Age in Melbourne. A former correspondent for Britain's New Scientist magazine, he has been science editor of ABC Online and was a founding editor of Newton science magazine. The winner of 27 awards - including Editor of the Year (twice in a row) for his work on COSMOS, and the Australian Film Institute Award for Best Documentary - he is a former president of the World Federation of Science Journalists. He is scheduled to be among the first 100 citizen astronauts to fly on Virgin Galactic's spaceliner service when flights begin in 2012.
Deputy Editor and Online Editor
Jacqui Hayes tries to hide her unnatural obsession with physics in her day-to-day life, often with little success. With a Bachelor of Advanced Science with Honours in Physics from the University of Sydney and a Graduate Diploma in Science Communication from the Australian National University, she forayed into the magazine world in 2006 with a three-week-long internship at COSMOS. She continued writing as a freelancer, then joined the team permanently as a sub-editor. A winner of a Highly Commended Newcomer to Journalism award, she is now Deputy Editor of COSMOS and Editor of Cosmos Online. When she is not searching the world for the best stories, she represents Australia in underwater rugby, is a surf lifesaver at Freshwater beach and lovingly cares for a Wollemi pine.
Assistant Editor
Fiona MacDonald began her training in science journalism when she turned seven and decided to explain to anyone who would listen why giraffes have such long tongues (to allow them to reach around the thorns on desert trees to get to the leaves). It was no surprise to any of them that she went on to study for a Bachelor of Science with Honours in Zoology at the University of Melbourne while writing for the university magazine, Farrago. She also completed a Graduate Diploma of Journalism from Deakin University before she became Chief Sub-editor of ScienceAlert and a freelance science journalist. She wrote for Popular Science, ABC Science Online and Pet Magazine before making the move from Melbourne to Sydney to become Assistant Editor of COSMOS.
Art Director
Lucy Glover has worked as a magazine designer across a range of trade and consumer titles in Australia, New Zealand and Great Britain. Formerly the Art Director of Beer & Brewer, Australian FourFourTwo and The Socceroo, she's also served as Assistant Art Director at Australian Table, worked at the British and Scottish Conservative Party's Heartland magazine, and was art editor for other custom titles. A graduate of the Hull College of Art and with a Master of Arts in design studies from London's Guildhall University, she was the winner of the trophy for Best Consumer Magazine Cover at the 2008 Bell Awards for Publishing Excellence.
Fiction Editor
Damien Broderick is one of Australia's most renowned science fiction writers, and has served as the magazine's fiction editor since its inception. A novelist, futurist, critical theorist and a senior research fellow at the University of Melbourne, he holds a doctorate from Deakin University in the comparative semiotics of science and literature. Credited with inventing the term 'virtual reality', his SF writing has been recognised with five Ditmar and three Aurealis awards, most recently the 2007 Aurealis Award for Best Science Fiction Novel for K-Machines. He's also the recipient of the 2005 Distinguished Scholarship Award from the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts.
Contributing Editor, London
Robin McKie has been science editor of Britain's The Observer since 1982 and has written a number of successful books, including Panic: The Story of AIDS, Genetic Jigsaw and The Dawn of Man. He resides in London with his wife and three children, and spends much of his free time watching his favourite football team, the Glasgow Rangers.
Contributing Editor, Melbourne
Elizabeth Finkel is a former research biochemist who took up science journalism. One of the founders of COSMOS, she is the Australian correspondent for the prestigious U.S. journal, Science, and her articles have appeared in a range of publications from The Lancet and Nature Medicine to The Age and Sydney Morning Herald newspapers. She is the author of Stem Cells: Controversy on the Frontiers of Science, for which she won a Queensland Premier’s Literary Award in 2004. Her work for COSMOS was recognised in 2007 with two Bell Magazine Awards: Best Single Article and Best Analytical Article.
Contributing Editor, Ottawa
Peter Calamai is the national science reporter for the Toronto Star. He’s been a foreign correspondent in Europe, the Soviet bloc, the Middle East, Washington DC and more than 35 countries in Africa. Assignments have included armed conflicts, Apollo missions, natural disasters and more election campaigns than he’d care to recall. The winner of numerous journalism awards, he’s a graduate in physics from McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. In April 2008, he won the Peter Kirkby Memorial Medal for Outstanding Service to Canadian Physics, awarded every two years by the Canadian Association of Physicists.
