User:Andrew A. Skolnick

For the past three decades, I've been a science and medical writer and photographer. My articles and photographs have been published in Smithsonian, Natural History, Ranger Rick Nature Magazine, National Geographic World, The New York Times, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Encyclopaedia Britannica, and many other publications.

In 1999, the Post-Dispatch nominated two colleagues and me for a Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Journalism for a series on correctional health care. The series was awarded Amnesty International USA's Spotlight on Media Award and other honors.[1][2] [3] This work grew out of my research as an inaugural Rosalynn Carter Fellow for Mental Health Journalism.[4] Some other honors I've received include World Hunger Year's Harry Chapin Award for Impact on Hunger and Poverty, for a series in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) on health problems along the U.S.-Mexican border; the John P. McGovern Medal for preeminent contributions to medical communication from the American Medical Writers Association; and CSICOP's Responsibility in Journalism Award for an investigative article on the deceptive health marketing schemes of the Transcendental Mediation organization.

As an associate news editor at JAMA from 1989 to 1998, I wrote more than 230 Medical News & Perspective articles[5]. Prior to that, I worked as life sciences editor for the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign News Bureau and as a science writer for the March of Dimes Birth Defects Foundation. More recently, I served as executive director of the Center for Inquiry's Commission for Scientific Medicine and Mental Health. I am now writing for Physician's First Watch, an on line publication of the Massachusetts Medical Society, and other media.

I earned my masters degree in journalism from [[Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism]] in 1981. In the spring of 1996, I taught four journalism courses at Shanghai International Studies University in China. I also taught an undergraduate seminar in scientific photography at Yale University, where I worked as a science photographer for the Department of Biology. I live in Amherst, N.Y. with a gorgeous "fox red" Labrador retriever, who by 18 months of age already earned more awards and titles than his dad.[6][7] He and I volunteer as a therapy dog team at local hospitals.