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

WellCommons -- a new approach to local health reporting

<p>Most health sites focus on personal health -- what individuals can do to improve their own or their families’ health. But at a local level, health is a community issue. For example, we’re all supposed to get regular checkups. If everyone in a community does not have access to good health care, however, then the advice is useless. Our kids are supposed to eat healthy food, but if school lunch programs provide mac-and-cheese, French fries and few vegetables, then the community is failing those kids.