Watch Gary Taubes’ Schmid College Commencement address (beginning at the 16-minute mark).

As our graduating students depart Schmid College, they depart as scientists.  Regardless of their career paths, science communication is one of the vital roles they can play in society. It is because of the importance of science communication that Schmid College has chosen to invite science journalist Gary Taubes to speak at its Commencement Ceremony at 10:00 a.m. on Saturday, May 23, 2015.

Taubes is an award-winning author, science journalist, and is a correspondent for Science magazine. He is the only print journalist to have won three Science in Society Journalism awards, given by the National Association of Science Writers.

Taubes has a bachelors degree in Applied Physics from Harvard University and masters degrees in Aerospace Engineering from Stanford University and in Journalism from Columbia University.  He has used that rich educational foundation to delve deeply into subjects such as high energy physics, the cold fusion controversy, and more recently, the intersection of diet and health. In a 2012 lecture, he explained what led him to this last topic.

 “I’m kind of obsessed with this question of how hard it is to do science right and how easy it is to get the wrong answer… and some friends said if you’re interested in bad science, which I was, I should write about public health because there is so much of it there.”

His investigative reporting into the biological impact of what we eat led him in 2012 to co-found the Nutrition Science Initiative with the aim of “reducing the individual, social, and economic toll of obesity and its related diseases by improving the quality of science in nutrition and obesity research.”

You can view a 2012 lecture about Taubes’ work below.