Jacob Berkowitz

Jacob Berkowitz is a Canadian author, journalist and playwright whose work combines a love of science and story. www.jacobberkowitz.com

For the past two decades he’s popularized science and nature in a wide variety of roles: as a wilderness canoe guide, a high school science teacher, a natural history museum public affairs officer, and as a writer.

Berkowitz' freelance journalism credits during the past 15 years include stories in newspapers and magazines across Canada. His writing ranges from a first-person feature on social trends in vasectomy, to how our view of the universe is shaped by the way NASA colors images from the Hubble Space Telescope.

Through Quantum Writing, the science writing boutique he founded in 2000, Berkowitz popularizes the work of leading scientists at major research-based organizations in Canada and the United States.

His first book, Jurassic Poop: What Dinosaurs (and Others) Left Behind received the 2008 American Institute of Physics children’s book prize. His book Alien Earth: The Amazing Search for Life in the Universe will be published in spring 2009.

His series of four lectures while at KITP reflect on the 50th anniversary, in 2009, of C.P. Snow's classic book on science and society The Two Cultures http://online.itp.ucsb.edu/online/resident/ . These lectures explore how we can move from thinking of the relationship between journalists and scientists as a problem, to that of one filled with possibility for reshaping our view of the Universe and ourselves.