Mary Knudson

Mary Knudson is a medical writer and editor who is co-writing a book on heart failure that will be published in 2009. She was a medical and science writer for The Sun in Baltimore for 17 years, writing features, news stories, analytical pieces, and many front-page narrative tales and investigative series. Knudson won one of the top two national awards for science writing, a Science-in-Society Award from the National Association of Science Writers (NASW). Awarded the Harvard Journalism Fellowship for Advanced Studies in Public Health, she spent an academic year at Harvard where, among other things, she cloned a frog growth gene while working in a cancer research lab and gathered material for a front-page series in The Sun on how science gets done, “Life in a Lab”. Knudson co-edited the first edition of A Field Guide for Science Writers and is co-editor with Deborah Blum and Robin Marantz Henig of the all-new second edition of the Field Guide published in 2005 by Oxford University Press and endorsed by NASW as its official guide. Other work includes a series of children's books on female scientists and a cover story for Technology Review on bacterial resistance to antibiotics, and work as a website editor of science and medical stories. Knudson served on the board of NASW for 10 years and helped create the NASW annual professional workshops. She is a former president of the D.C. Science Writers Association (DCSWA), was Freedom Forum Medical Journalist-in-Residence at Ithaca College in New York , and sits on the Managing Committee for the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Science Journalism Awards. She has organized a number of science writing workshops and has been a moderator or speaker at science writing seminars at the Smithsonian, AAAS, the Freedom Forum, NASW, and DCSWA. At Hopkins, Knudson created the signature course Medicine in Action and teaches science-medical writing workshops, nonfiction workshops, The Literature of Science, and Techniques of Science-Medical Writing.

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