The John B. Oakes Award Jury

Douglas S. Barasch is the editor-in-chief of OnEarth Magazine, a quarterly publication of the Natural Resources Defense Council founded in 1979. Barasch became editor in 2003 and since then has led the magazine to the Independent Press Award for Best Environmental Coverage, the Phillip D. Reed Memorial Award for Outstanding Writing on the Southern Environment, and several citations from the Society of Publication Designers. Barasch was previously a senior editor at Discover magazine and a freelance contributor to numerous publications, including The New York Times Magazine, New York, Elle, and Redbook, where he was a contributing editor.

Dorothy Brown is a special projects editor at The Philadelphia Inquirer, where she was the founding editor of the medical and science team and editor of the 1997 Pulitzer Prize-winning series on the choices confronting critically ill patients who sought to die with dignity. She is a recipient of the 1997 “Journalist of the Year” Knight Ridder Excellence Award. A veteran journalist who worked at the now defunct Philadelphia Bulletin and Dallas Times-Herald, Brown has devoted her career to investigative reporting, with an emphasis on health and science.

Steve Curwood is the executive producer and host of National Public Radio's Living On Earth, which he created in the spring of 1990. He has reported for NPR, the Boston Globe, WBUR-FM, and WGBH-TV in Boston. Mr. Curwood has shared the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for his education reporting, and he lectures in environmental science and public policy at Harvard University.

Jim Detjen is the director of the Knight Center for Environmental Journalism at Michigan State University’s School of Journalism. Formerly an award-winning science and environment reporter for The Philadelphia Inquirer, Detjen is also a co-founder and past president of the Society of Environmental Journalists. The Center, founded in 1995, offers academic and professional training for current and future environmental journalists and was created to house the first endowed chair in environmental journalism by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. Under Professor Detjen’s leadership, the program has gained a worldwide reputation for the study, practice and research of environmental journalism.

Peter Dykstra is an executive producer at CNN, who oversees the network's science, technology, and environment unit, as well as the weekly program Next@CNN. His special program investigating allegations of human hardships caused by the Endangered Species Act and other environmental laws won the Environmental Media Association's award for newsmagazine programming, and his environmental program Earth Matters received a National Headliner Award. In 1993, he shared an Emmy Award for coverage of the Mississippi River floods.

Jonathan Z. Larsen is the former editor-in-chief of New Times and the Village Voice and currently serves as the chairman of the editorial board of OnEarth Magazine. Larsen is a freelance writer who serves on the editorial boards of Columbia Journalism Review and OnEarth Magazine. He has written for a wide range of publications, including Life, New York Magazine, Columbia Journalism Review , Condé Nast Traveler, and Manhattan inc.

Don J. Melnick is the Thomas Hunt Morgan Professor of Conservation Biology at Columbia University and executive director for the Center for Environmental Research and Conservation (CERC) at Columbia. Melnick holds a Ph.D in Physical Anthropology from Yale University and has done extensive research in population genetics and conservation and molecular evolution. He directed an environmental workshop for journalists in Punta Cana, the Dominican Republican in March 2005 as part of the New York Times Foundation Institutes program.

John G. H. Oakes, son of John B. Oakes, is executive editor of Atlas Books. A former editor for Grove Press and co-publisher of Nation Books, he has written for, among other publications, the Associated Press, the Review of Contemporary Fiction and the International Herald Tribune.

David Ropeik is a consultant and speaker on risk communication and risk perception to government, business, trade associations, consumer groups, and educational institutions. A former instructor of risk communication at the Harvard School of Public Health and co-director of the school’s professional education course “The Risk Communication Challenge, he is co-author of RISK, A Practical Guide for Deciding What’s Dangerous and What’s Safe in the World Around You, published by Houghton Mifflin in 2002. Ropeik is the creator and director of the program “Improving Media Coverage of Risk”, a training program for journalists, and a member of the risk communication working group of the Global Roundtable on Climate Change, part of the Earth Institute at Columbia University. Ropeik worked as a television journalist, specializing in coverage of environmental issues for 22 years in Boston and a member of the Board of Directors of the Society of Environmental Journalists for nine years.

Jonathan Weiner is an award-winning science writer. His works include Planet Earth, companion book to an Emmy-award-winning seven-part PBS television series (1986); The Next One Hundred Years (1990); The Beak of the Finch (1994), winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Science (1994) and the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction (1995); Time, Love, Memory (1999), winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for General Nonfiction, and finalist for the Aventis Science Prize (2000); His Brother's Keeper (2004), finalist, Los Angeles Times Book Prize (2005). He is a contributor to the New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, the New Republic, and others. He teaches science writing at Columbia's Graduate School of Journalism.

Jocelyn C. Zuckerman is the articles editor at Gourmet magazine, where she has been on staff since 1996. During her time at Gourmet, Zuckerman has assigned and edited stories ranging from such topics as trans-fats and Wal-mart to the ethics of eating lobster and the plight of AIDS orphans in Uganda. An alumna of the Columbia University Journalism School, where she graduated with honors in 1996, she also coordinates Gourmet’s annual city issues and oversees features dealing with travel, cooking, and the political and social aspects of food production and consumption. In 2001, Zuckerman won a James Beard Journalism Award for her profile of Canadian chef Susur Lee. Prior to journalism school, she served as a Peace Corps volunteer in western Kenya.