About COSMOS

The team behind the award-winning bi-monthly print magazine, COSMOS, the biggest-selling Australian science magazine; and Cosmos Online, the news and features site.

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

Wilson da Silva is a former on-air reporter for ABC TV's Quantum program, has served as editor of the magazines Newton and 21C, was science editor of ABC Online, has been a foreign correspondent for Reuters, and is a former staff journalist on The Age and Sydney Morning Herald newspapers. The winner of 23 journalism and film awards - including Editor of the Year (twice in a row) for his work on COSMOS, and the Australian Film Institute Award for Best Documentary for The Diplomat - he is a member of the board of the World Federation of Science Journalists, and its immediate past president. More

Deputy Editor/Online Editor

John Pickrell has been a science journalist for the past six years. Formerly an editor at New Scientist in London, he has been a reporter for the magazines Science and Science News, and regularly wrote for National Geographic's online news service and BBC Wildlife magazine. A graduate in biology from Imperial College, he has a masters from London's Natural History Museum where he revelled in exploring its hidden depths. He lived in Washington DC for a year in 2002, and now plans to develop an encyclopaedic knowledge of Sydney beach life.

Art Director

Corey Butler has worked as a designer across a range of print titles, from men's and technology magazines to newspapers like The Sydney Morning Herald and The Sun Herald, and the QANTAS inflight magazine, where he served as deputy art director. A keen photographer, he has a Bachelor of Arts in Design from the University of Western Sydney with double majors in photography, and his photos have appeared in books and magazines around Australia. A big fan of science since high school, he took advanced courses and - but for the flip of a coin - almost chose it as a career.

Senior Sub-editor

Kate Arneman applies good grammar and polish to articles, as well as keeping the magazine production line running. A fluent German speaker, she completed a combined Bachelor of Arts in communications and international studies at the University of Technology in Sydney, which included two semesters at the University of Konstanz in Germany. She has worked as a freelance researcher for FilmWorld and Michael Chugg Entertainment, and landed her first sub-editing job at Marie Claire where she served for two years before making a quantum leap from fashion to physics.

Picture Researcher

Sarah Wood is fresh out of university with a Bachelor of Science Communication in ecology from the University of New South Wales in Sydney. A former editor of the university's online science engineering and technology review, OnSET, she worked as a presenter and helped develop the institution's science outreach shows for schools. She served as one of Luna Media's first publishing cadets in 2006, becoming Editorial & Marketing Assistant before being promoted into the picture researcher's role, where she helps arrange photo shoots and finds all those great images used in the magazine.

Sub-editor and Staff Writer

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 in physics from the University of Sydney, she forayed into the magazine world in 2006 with a three-week internship at COSMOS magazine. Later, she continued writing for COSMOS while performing travelling science shows in schools and fairs around Australia with the Questacon Science Circus, before finally landing a job at the magazine. Now she fixes and tinkers with articles, and still writes the odd article herself.

Online Production Editor

Anthony Willis ditched a potential career in science when - after completing a Bachelor of Science in ecology – he was enticed into the world of web development. Since then, he has worked across a range of digital media from web to interactive TV and mobile telephony for some of Australia's leading media and telecommunications companies, including the Australian Broadcasting Corp, Telstra BigPond, the Seven Network and Austar. His work at Cosmos Online was recognised with a 2006 Best Internet Site trophy at Australia's Bell Magazine Awards.

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.

Editor, Omnivore

Bob Guntrip is the dry but usually friendly editor of the magazine's review section, which every issue profiles books, films and DVDs in science worthy of mention. His wry sense of humour is evident in its pages, and his attention to detail keeps the rest of the team on their toes. A synthetic chemist by training, he is the former chief sub-editor of Newton science magazine, and has served as an editor or writer of everything from motorcycles to handyman titles.

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.

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.

Contributing Editor, Sydney

Tim Dean has spent the past decade reporting on science and technology in print, online and over the airwaves. With an honours degree in philosophy, he is the former editor of COSMOS and has been a regular contributor since its foundation. The former editor of PC Authority, one of Australia’s leading personal computer magazines, he is an award-winning technology writer, has been a contributor to a range of publications including The Age, Atomic and G Magazine, and spent four years as the technology expert on the top-rated Chip4Brains radio show on Sydney’s 2GB.

Contributing Editor, Wellington

Kim Griggs is a freelance science journalist based in Wellington, New Zealand. For a decade she was a foreign correspondent for the Knight-Ridder newswire in Tokyo, London and finally Sydney, where she became bureau chief for Australasia. She returned to her native New Zealand in 1998 and has travelled widely, including a trip to Antarctica from which sprang her first book, On Blue Ice: A Not Very Brave Journey to Antarctica. She writes for The Listener, BBC News Online, Unlimited, and Nature Biotechnology.