I'm founder and publisher of ACEs Connection, an organization that runs the community-of-practice social network ACEsConnection.com, with more than 26,000 members and growing (Nov. 2018), and ACEsTooHigh, a news site for the general public. ACEs refers to ACEs science, which includes the CDC's Adverse Childhood Experiences Study, which shows that child trauma is a leading of adult onset of chronic disease, mental illness, violence and being a victim of violence, among many consequences. Other parts of ACEs science include the neurobiology of toxic stress, the short- and long-term health consequences of toxic stress, the epigenetic consequences of toxic stress, and resilience research. ACEs Connection is funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, The California Endowment, the Lisa & John Pritzker Family Fund, the George Sarlo Foundation, and Genentech.

I've been a science/technology/health journalist for nearly 30 years. In 2008-2009, I was a fellow at the Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute at the University of Missouri. I started my career in newspapers and, after 12 years, founded a sci-tech feature service with 20 newspaper clients worldwide, including the Los Angeles Times, the Dallas Morning News, the Washington Post, and Asahi Shimbun's AERA Magazine.

I moved to the digital world in 1996 as part of the first group of videojournalists at New York Times Television, and later did multimedia reporting for the New York Times, Discovery Channel, and MSNBC.com.

For four years, I lived and worked in Kenya and Bali, Indonesia. I've written for magazines including National Geographic, Nature, and Science. As editorial director of Oceans Now, I led a terrific team to create the ocean science niche news sites TOPP.org and the Great Turtle Race 2007. I've taught at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism and the Knight Digital Media Center, and consulted with news organizations transitioning to webcentric newsrooms. I'm  co-director, with Dr. Lori Dorfman at the Berkeley Media Studies Group, of the Violence Reporting Project, which encourages news organizations to take a public health and solution-oriented approach to crime reporting.

Articles

Pediatricians screen parents for ACEs to improve health of babies

The Children’s Clinic, tucked in a busy office park five miles outside downtown Portland, OR, and bustling with noisy babies, boisterous kids and energetic pediatricians, seems ordinary enough. But, for the last two years, a quiet revolution has been brewing in its exam rooms.

Going Beyond Guns: More Questions About Newtown, CT, Massacre

The last 15 years of research on how adverse childhood experiences cause adult onset of chronic disease, mental illness, violence and being a victim of violence is unequivocal. To understand what happened to Adam Lanza, we have to ask difficult questions.