CASW Connector is a curated and continually updated collection of resources from a wide variety of disciplines, organizations, centers, and individuals that all serve the same goal: to promote excellence in interpreting science for the public.
The CASW Connector database began with a research project undertaken in 2022 by Joe Palca, then a science correspondent at National Public Radio, under the auspices of the Council for the Advancement of Science Writing and with the support of Schmidt Futures. Joe tracked down people, organizations, documents, activities, written advice, and research products that he thought would be of use to would-be, early-career, and veteran science journalists and science communicators.
Connector incorporates Joe’s work and is intended to grow over time. The database includes hundreds of articles, guides, training programs, conferences, fellowships, career advice, best practices, and more on issues related to communicating science. It includes resources for science journalists, science communicators, and anyone else interested in interpreting science for the public, ranging from students exploring career options to mid- and late-career writers interested in continuing training and networking. Although CASW is based in the U.S., many resources in the database can be accessed and used anywhere around the globe. We welcome submissions and suggestions of international resources.
Nearly all of the resources accessed through Connector are produced by organizations other than CASW. While all resources are reviewed for suitability for at least one of our intended audiences, inclusion of a resource does not imply endorsement of its author, publisher, or organization.
We rely on readers like you to keep our database growing! Have a favorite article or training program? Want to share more broadly that Twitter thread you refer to periodically? Send it to us via our suggestion form. See an issue with a resource in Connector? Let us know. Sign up for our newsletter to receive news on resources as we add them.
Learn more about how to search and browse the resource database in our starter guide to CASW Connector.
CASW Connector is produced by the Council for the Advancement of Science Writing and made possible by generous support from Schmidt Futures and the Rita Allen Foundation.
People
Kate Travis
Kate Travis is the managing editor of CASW Connector, overseeing the Connector website, newsletter and programming. Kate is a science journalist with more than 20 years of experience as an editor, project manager, and product leader. She was previously the digital director at Science News, where she managed the website and oversaw digital news production, video, multimedia, analytics, newsletters, and audience engagement. Previously Kate was a contributing editor at Science Careers and news editor at the Journal of the National Cancer Institute. She is the author of a chapter on measuring success in The Tactical Guide to Science Journalism (Oxford University Press, 2022) and coauthor of a guide to building a newsroom product team, published by the News Product Alliance.
Contact Kate: kate@casw.org
Betsy Ladyzhets
Betsy Ladyzhets is CASW Connector’s community manager, keeping the Connector database up to date, working with readers to continually improve the website, and writing and producing the newsletter. Betsy is an independent science, health, and data journalist focused on COVID-19 and the future of public health. She is an editor at The Sick Times, a new nonprofit publication chronicling the Long Covid crisis, which she co-founded after more than three years of writing the COVID-19 Data Dispatch blog and newsletter. She was recently a journalism fellow at MuckRock where she contributed to award-winning COVID-19 investigations. Her freelance work has appeared in Science News, The Atlantic, STAT News, FiveThirtyEight, MIT Technology Review, and other national publications.
Contact Betsy: betsyl@casw.org
Funders
Connector is funded by grants from Schmidt Futures, a philanthropic initiative of Eric and Wendy Schmidt, and the Rita Allen Foundation, which supports early-stage biomedical research, seeds innovative approaches to fostering informed civic engagement, and develops knowledge and networks to make philanthropy go further.
CASW
The Council for the Advancement of Science Writing is a nonprofit organization committed to improving the quantity and quality of science news reaching the public. Led by a board of directors composed of senior journalists and others committed to excellence in the communication of science, CASW develops and funds programs to help reporters and writers produce accurate and informative stories about developments in science, technology, medicine and the environment. Sixty years after its founding in 1959, CASW adopted a new focus on the quality, diversity and sustainability of science journalism, in response to the challenges facing the field in the 21st century.