Jonathan Weiner, Pulitzer Prize-winning science writer, will speak at the University of Tennessee at 8 p.m. Monday, March 14 in the Shiloh Room of the University Center.
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Pulitzer Prize-winning science writer Jonathan Weiner
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The event is free and open to the public.
Weiner’s speech, entitled “His Brother’s Keeper: A Story from the Edge of Medicine,” will relate the true story of an engineer who became an amateur medical researcher in an effort to find a cure for his brother’s fatal disease.
The talk is this year’s Alfred and Julia Hill Lecture. The Hill Lecture series brings distinguished science communicators to campus to share their thoughts on science, society, and the mass media.
The lectures are made possible by an endowment created by Tom Hill and Mary Frances Hill Holton in honor of their parents Alfred and Julia Hill, founders of The Oak Ridger newspaper.
The Hill family’s endowment of the lecture series was a gift to the School of Journalism and Electronic Media in the College of Communication and Information.
Weiner won the Pulitzer Prize for Nonfiction in 1995 for The Beak of the Finch, the story of how evolution is proceeding today in the world around us. It focuses on a stoic and resourceful husband-and-wife team who since 1973 have lived for portions of each year on a small island in the Galapagos. They study how climate cycles result in evolutionary changes among the finches of the islands that Darwin made famous.
Weiner’s next book, Time, Love, Memory, won the National Book Critics Circle Award. It traces an eccentric scientist’s discoveries about the origins of human nature.
Weiner is noted for getting close to his subjects, working with them for extended periods of time so that he can depict their research with accuracy and sensitivity.
After graduating from Harvard, Weiner began his science-writing career as a senior editor with The Scientist. His shorter works have appeared in The New Yorker, New York Times, New Republic, and Washington Post.
Parking for the lecture is available in the University Center garage.