The team behind COSMOS, Australia’s #1 science media brand and the winner of 44 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 the managing editor of Newton science magazine. The winner of 31 awards - including twice Editor of the Year for his work on COSMOS, and the Australian Film Institute trophy for Best Documentary - he is a former president of the World Federation of Science Journalists. He is scheduled to fly into space on Virgin Galactic in 2012.
Deputy Editor
Heather Catchpole has a degree in science and a masters in science communication from the Australian National University and is a former editor of the children’s science magazine Scientriffic. Before landing the gig of Deputy Editor, she was a regular contributor COSMOS, tripping to New Zealand and Kangaroo Island, among other places, to write about science of all types. She's the author of five science books for children, which have been published in four languages and one of which was shortlisted for the British Royal Society's Junior Prize for Science. She's successfully led national science projects and was co-awarded best digital engagement strategy at Publishers Australia Excellence Awards with the COSMOS team in 2009 for her contribution to Hello from Earth. She's worked as a science journalist at the ABC and freelance for more than 10 years and was also deputy editor of The Australian Geologist and assistant editor of the Australian Journal of Earth Sciences. She was a 2011 finalist for Publisher Australia's prestigious Journalist of the Year Award.
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. In 2010 was named New Journalist of the Year at the annual Publishers Australia Excellence Awards.
Online Editor
Becky Crew was one of those kids. She memorised dinosaur names. And collected plastic dinosaurs to decorate her room. And kept them, even long after the fad had past. Her fascination with ancient life led her to complete a Bachelor of Arts majoring in Classical Archaeology at the University of Sydney, after which she swapped the pottery shards for her true love, plesiosaurs, and entered the burgeoning world of science blogging with Save Your Breath for Running Ponies. Armed with a Graduate Diploma in Media Practice and the determination to give vegetarian spiders, venomous Sinornithosauruses and tongue-eating isopods the attention they deserve, she was voted ‘Australia’s Best Science Blogger’ in 2010.
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
Cat Sparks is an Australian science fiction writer and editor. She is the winner of five Aurealis and nine Ditmar awards - the two highest honours in Australian science fiction - as well as an international Writers of the Future trophy. A co-founder of Agog! Press, publisher of 10 anthologies of award-winning fiction, she is also a graphic designer and a photographer. She served as the official photographer for two Premiers of New South Wales and travelled to Jordan on three occasions to chronicle archaeological expeditions. She lives with her partner, author Robert Hood, and their three cats, Smersh, Pazuzu and Nemo.
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 a 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. 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 has snapped up four Publishers Australia Excellence Awards, most recently the 2010 Analytical Writer of the Year, and in 2011 she was named Higher Education Journalist of the Year at the National Press Club in Canberra for her stories in COSMOS.
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.
