Northwest Science Writers Association

At the member meeting on Thursday, January 16 at Folio, NSWA members gathered to meet the 2020 NSWA board and celebrate the winners of NSWA’s Best of the Northwest Science Writing Awards.

In his frequent contributions to Scientific American and in a new book from MIT Press, Christof Koch guides us through the neural underpinnings of cognition, consciousness, and subjective experience. Koch joined NSWA for an evening of thinking about thought on Nov. 26.

NSWA experienced the majesty, awesome destruction, and amazing rebirth of the Pacific Northwest’s most violent volcano on our first-ever camping adventure Aug. 2 – Aug. 4. Hosted by the Mount St. Helens Institute, we saw parts of the national monument that few ever experience.

NSWA hosted an hour-long panel on June 25 that explored what researchers are learning about the opioid addiction and possible solutions to the crisis, and how we as science communicators can disseminate this research accurately and responsibly.

We grabbed our thinking caps for our second-annual NSWA Science Trivia Night on May 22 at Floating Bridge Brewing Co.

NSWA mixed and mingled with the next generation of science communicators by joining the ComSciCon-Pacific Northwest participants on April 12 at Optimism Brewing.

Ever wanted to incorporate data into your storytelling? From interactive maps to engaging graphs and charts, this workshop on March 25 helped us understand how to turn raw data into compelling visualizations ready to share online, using Tableau Public.

Can a computer ace a high school biology exam? What about navigate a typical household, or play Pictionary? NSWA learned about artificial intelligence research at AI2 on Feb. 20.

We let our inner geeks out to play at our biggest and best event of the year on Jan. 10 at Paul Allen’s Living Computers Museum + Labs.