The team behind COSMOS, Australia’s #1 science magazine in print, iPad and online and the winner of 47 awards, including the Magazine of the Year trophy in both 2009 and 2006, best digital engagement strategy, and twice Editor of the Year, at the annual Publishers Australia Excellence Awards. COSMOS has also won the American Institute of Physics Science Writing Award, the Reuters/IUCN Award for Excellence in Environmental Journalism, the City of Sydney Lord Mayor’s Sustainability Award and an Earth Journalism Award.
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 2015.
Managing 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 in 2011, 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 and now works as COSMOS‘ Managing Editor.
Deputy Editor
Jonathan Nally has been a science writer and broadcaster for almost 30 years and has several awards to his name. A founder and editor of Australia’s first popular astronomy magazine, Sky & Space in 1988, he was also founding editor of Australian Sky & Telescope in 2005. A regular on TV and radio, including the Today Show on Australia’s Nine Network and The Science Show on ABC Radio National, he has contributed to numerous books and co-wrote a major planetarium show on black holes narrated by the Oscar-winning actor Geoffrey Rush which went on to win an international award for best narrative. And in between all that, he finds time to run his own space news web site, SpaceInfo.
Sub-Editor
Rivqa Rafael has a science degree with honours in microbiology and a masters in professional writing. She has previously worked as a proofreader and later as an assistant editor for the Medical Journal of Australia, working on articles about health research, opinion and policy, and was the managing editor of Critical Care and Resuscitation, a specialist medical journal. She has also edited several books as a freelancer. A subscriber to COSMOS since its inception, she is now its sub-editor and reviews editor.
Staff Writer
Gemma Black, a former COSMOS intern, completed a degree in journalism at the University of Technology, Sydney, then took up a scholarship to the Danish School of Media and Journalism in 2009 as part of the Global Environmental Journalism Initiative, a collaborative program between Australian and European universities aimed at training student journalists on how to report complex environmental issues. While in Denmark, she worked with a team of journalists covering the Beyond Kyoto conference – a three-day meeting of science and industry held in preparation for the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference. Before returning to COSMOS in 2012, she served as a staff writer at 4X4 Australia magazine, a job that took her all over Australia – from the untouched western forests of Tasmania to following biologists in the remote Kimberley desert.
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.
Designer
Fern Bale is a designer whose work is influenced and inspired by a desire to make science more accessible. She joined COSMOS in 2012 after working in London at the journal Nature, where she had been an assistant art editor. She’s long enjoyed dabbling in a variety of art and design disciplines, including graphic design, painting, photography, web design, 3D modeling and animation. She has a BA in Graphics from Britain’s Southampton Solent University, where her final degree project was an interactive animation for young adults on how viruses attack cells in the style of British game show Robot Wars.
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.
