CARMEN DRAHL
Award-winning science communicator and social media power user based in Washington, DC.
Specialties:
interviewing, science writing, social media, Twitter, Storify, YouTube,
public speaking, hosting, video production, iPhone videography,
non-linear video editing, blogging (WordPress and Blogger), HTML website
coding
Links
Carmen Drahl (@carmendrahl) | Twitter
www.linkedin.com/in/carmendrahl/en
http://www.ddn-news.com/
http://cenblog.org/the-safety-zone/
Carmen Drahl – Google+
https://plus.google.com/102607585959501559706
Carmen Drahl – YouTube
https://www.youtube.com/user/carmencen
Carmen Drahl’s profile – Vine
https://vine.co/u/929508381448880128
Carmen Drahl, Introductory Remarks for Forensics on Vimeo
https://vimeo.com/80317912
Phone: 202-872-4502
Fax: 202-872-8727 or -6381
Education
Princeton University
Ph.D., Chemistry
2002 – 2007
Ph.D. with Erik J. SorensenShe was on a team that completed the first total synthesis of
abyssomicin C, a molecule found in small quantities in nature that
showed hints of promise as a potential antibiotic. I constructed
molecular probes from abyssomicin for proteomics studies of its
biological activity.
M.A. with George L. McLendon
worked
toward developing a drug conjugate as a potential treatment for cancer. I
synthesized a photosensitizer dye-peptide conjugate for targeting the
cell death pathway called apoptosis.
At a reception before the Alumni Day luncheon, President Tilghman (third
from left) congratulated the winners of the University’s highest awards
for students: (from left) Pyne Prize winners Lester Mackey and Alisha
Holland; and Jacobus Fellowship recipients Sarah Pourciau, Egemen
Kolemen and Carmen Drahl. Unable to attend the event was Jacobus Fellowship winner William Slauter. (photo: Denise Applewhite
Drew University
B.A., Chemistry
1998 – 2002
Graduated
summa cum laude with specialized honors in chemistry. Honors thesis
entitled “Structural, kinetic, and mechanistic studies: the protein
tyrosine phosphatases CD45 and PTP1B”
Activities and Societies: Phi Beta Kappa
Carmen Drahl, Class of 2002,
Experience
Science Journalist
Freelance
January 2014 – Present Washington D.C. Metro Area
Multimedia
science journalist – I deliver clean products on time. Experience in
reporting on chemistry, food science, history of science, drug
development, science education.
Senior Editor, Chemical & Engineering News
American Chemical Society
August 2007 – December 2014 (7 years 5 months)Washington D.C. Metro Area
Reporting:Cover the science of chemistry for C&EN, the American Chemical
Society’s weekly magazine, circulation 160,000. Track new research
findings daily, particularly in forensic science, drug discovery,
organic chemistry, and food science.
Video:
Doubled circulation to C&EN’s YouTube channel in 2013. Scripted, narrated, edited footage.
Managed a core team of 4 and collaborated with other reporters to
produce 30 videos, some reproduced in The Atlantic, Scientific American,
Eater National, The Daily Mail.
Incepted, scripted, and co-hosted
“Speaking of Chemistry”, a monthly web show that summarizes top
chemistry news for the busy scientist.
Social Media:
Developed magazine-wide best practices for YouTube videos and Twitter. Ran staff workshops about Storify, Slashdot, and Reddit.
Hosting/Public Speaking:
Topics include communicating chemistry simply, transitioning from a
Ph.D. to careers in science communication. Moderated discussions on
chemophobia, social media usage in the chemical sciences. On-camera
co-host for web newscasts produced by ACS.
Innovation:
With
C&EN art and web teams, developed first-for-the-magazine features,
including a 90th anniversary commemorative timeline poster, a pullout
guide to top conference speakers, interactive quizzes and database
searches.
Carmen Drahl, senior editor of Chemical and Engineering News,
used her Ph.D. in chemistry as a springboard into the career she
envisioned for herself. Here she shares some advice that helped her make
the decision.
Carmen Drahl made the transition to a writing
career while earning a Ph.D. in chemistry at Princeton University. Born
and raised in New Jersey, she now lives in Washington, D.C., and reports
for Chemical and Engineering News (C&EN). At C&EN
she has written about how new medications get their names, explained
the science behind a controversial hair-straightening product, and
covered the scientific firestorm sparked by an alleged arsenic life
form. Her work has been featured on SiriusXM’s Doctor Radio, Radio New Zealand’s This Way Up, and elsewhere. Her coverage has also been recognized by MIT’s Knight Science Journalism Tracker.
(Open)1 honor or award
Scientific Cocktails: Award-winning video
Speaking of Chemistry: All About Tinsel
Carmen Drahl
Twitter Maven
World Central Kitchen
March 2013 – August 2014 (1 year 6 months)Washington D.C. Metro Area
she was the “voice of Twitter” for World Central Kitchen, the humanitarian
organization founded by renowned Chef José Andrés. Doubled followers to
Twitter account in 2013, developed Twitter strategy for projects and
events. Edited Annual Report, press releases and other communication
materials. Volunteered in person at outreach events.
Contributing Editor, AWIS Magazine
Association of Women in Science
December 2005 – August 2007 (1 year 9 months)
sHE
reported and wrote profiles of prominent women scientists in a range of
fields (molecular biology, physics, geoscience) for the Research
Advances column in AWIS Magazine.
Writer, various publications
Princeton University
April 2005 – May 2007 (2 years 2 months)
She
reported and wrote news for the Princeton University News Office’s
Research Notes, and wrote news and features for the Princeton University
Chemistry Department’s Industrial Affiliates Program Newsletter and
Chemistry Alumni Newsletter.
Honors & Awards
Eddie Digital Award- Best Video (B-to-B)
FOLIO Magazine
December 2014
Porter Ogden Jacobus Fellowship
Princeton University
February 2007
NSF Graduate Research Fellowship
National Science Foundation
2002
Volunteer Experience & Causes
Board Member
Princeton Alumni Weekly Magazine
October 2013
Advisory Committee
American Institute of Physics News and Media Services
October 2013
Member, Graduate Alumni Leadership Council
Princeton University
2009 – 2012 (3 years)
INTERVIEW
http://scienceblogs.com/clock/2010/04/12/scienceonline2010-interview-33/
Continuing with the tradition from last two years, I will occasionally post interviews with some of the participants of the ScienceOnline2010 conference that was held in the Research Triangle Park, NC back in January. See all the interviews in this series here. You can check out previous years’ interviews as well: 2008 and 2009.Today, I asked Carmen Drahl, Associate Editor for Science/Technology/Education at Chemical & Engineering News (find her as @carmendrahl on Twitter) to answer a few questions.
Welcome
to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little
bit more about yourself? Where are you coming from (both geographically
and philosophically)? What is your (scientific) background?
It’s a pleasure and a privilege to be interviewed, Bora.
Good
conversations make me happy. School was fun for me (well, maybe not
grad school) and that’s evolved into a desire to always be learning
something new. I enjoy doing nothing as much as I enjoy doing things. On
Mondays, if I’m not too busy, I take hip-hop dance classes.
her hometown is Hackettstown, New Jersey. M&M’s are made there. I got a
bachelor’s in chemistry from Drew University and a Ph.D. in chemistry at
Princeton. Scientifically my expertise hovers somewhere around the
interface between organic chemistry and biochemistry. A short while
after defending my dissertation, I moved to Washington DC to write for Chemical & Engineering News, and that’s where I’ve been for almost three years now.
When and how did you first discover science blogs?
Scandal
led me to science blogs. Seriously. In March 2006 I was still an
organic chemistry grad student. Everyone in my lab was buzzing about a
set of retractions in the Journal of the American Chemical Society
(disclosure: today I work for the American Chemical Society, which
publishes JACS). A rising young organic chemistry star retracted the
papers because work by one of his graduate students couldn’t be
reproduced. It was a big deal and became an even bigger deal as the
inevitable rumors (salacious and otherwise) surfaced. The blogosphere
had the details first. So that’s where Google pointed me and the other
members of my lab when we searched for more information. I learned about
the awesome (but sadly now defunct) blogs Tenderbutton and The Endless
Frontier, by Dylan Stiles and Paul Bracher, both chemistry grad students
like me. I also discovered the solid mix of chemistry and pharma at
Derek Lowe’s In the Pipeline, which is still the first blog I visit every day.
Tell us a little more about your career trajectory so far: interesting projects past and present?
By
the time I discovered science blogs I knew my career goals were
changing. I’d already been lucky enough to audit a science writing
course at Princeton taught by Mike Lemonick from TIME, and thought that
maybe science writing was a good choice for me. After reading chemistry
blogs for a while I realized “Hey, I can do this!” and started my own
blog, She Blinded Me with Science, in July 2006. It was the typical grad student blog, a mix of posts about papers I liked and life in the lab.
At C&E News I’ve contributed to its C&ENtral Science
blog, which premiered in spring 2008. I’ve experimented with a few
different kinds of posts- observations and on-the-street interviews when
I run into something chemistry-related in DC, in-depth posts from
meetings, and video demos of iPod apps. One of my favorite things to do
is toy with new audio/video/etc technology for the blog.
What is taking up the most of your time and passion these days? What are your goals?
In March I just started a new era in my web existence- I’m becoming a pharma blogger. I’m the science voice at The Haystack,
C&E News’s new pharma blog and one of seven new blogs the magazine
launched last month. My co-blogger is the talented Lisa Jarvis, who’s
written about the business side of pharma for ten years and who brings a
solid science background to the table as well. I kicked us off by
liveblogging/livetweeting a popular session at the American Chemical
Society’s meeting in San Francisco where drug companies reveal for the
first time the chemical structures of potential new drugs being tested
in clinical trials. The whole thing synced to FriendFeed as well. Folks
followed the talks from all three venues, which was great. I hope I can
continue doing that sort of thing in the future.
For
this August, I’m co-organizing a mini-symposium at the American
Chemical Society meeting in Boston about the chem/pharma blogosphere and
its impact on research and communication. I’m in the process of
inviting speakers right now. It’s my first time doing anything like this
and part of me is petrified that no one will show up. Tips on
organizing a conference session and how not to stress when doing so are
welcome!
More broadly, I’d love to get more chemistry bloggers to
connect with the community that attends ScienceOnline. I don’t ever want
to become that old (or not-so-old) person who is clueless about
them-thar newfangled whosiwhatsits that the kids are using nowadays.
What aspect of science communication and/or particular use of the Web in science interests you the most?
A
few things come to mind, actually. I’d like to think that the web has
made grad school a helluva lot less isolating for science grad students.
You have the virtual journal clubs like Totally Synthetic, posts like SciCurious’s letter to a grad student, etc.
As
a journalist the web’s capacity to equalize fascinates me. I’m
extremely lucky to have a staff gig as a science writer without having
gone to journalism school or landed a media fellowhip and it’s weird to
think that my old blog might’ve helped my visibility. I didn’t know Ed
Yong’s story until Scio10 but I think he’s a highly talented example of
how the web can open doors.
The web’s equalizing power goes to
readers of science content as well as writers, of course. In the ideal
situation a reader can give a writer instant feedback and you can get a
real conversation going, something that was much harder with the
snail-paced system of letters to the editor and reader surveys. Not that
the conversation is always civil. Most of C&EN’s readers have a
decent amount of scientific training, but the debate that rages whenever
we run an editorial about climate change is as intense as any I’ve
seen.
In cases like that I don’t know that the web gives people a
good representation of what the consensus is. For folks who don’t have
scientific training, how do you ensure that people don’t just go to the
content that already confirms their pre-existing beliefs about autism or
global warming? John Timmer touched on this more eloquently in his interview with you,
and I agree with him that I don’t think we have an answer yet. Though
on a slightly different note, I will mention that I’ve been enjoying the
New York Times’s recent attempts to recapture the spontaneity of
flipping through the newspaper in online browsing, like the Times Skimmer for Google Chrome.
What are some of your favourite science blogs? Have you discovered any cool science blogs by the participants at the Conference?
In addition to the blogs I’ve already mentioned I enjoy Carbon-Based Curiosities, Wired Science, Chemistry Blog, and Terra Sigillata, to name a few of the 50 or so blogs on my feed reader.
I discovered scads of new blogs at Scio10 but I’ll focus on the one that’s become required reading for me these days: Obesity Panacea.
I’d covered obesity drug development for C&EN but I’d never met
Travis Saunders and Peter Janiszewski or heard of their blog until the
conference.
What was the best aspect of ScienceOnline2010 for
you? Is there anything that happened at this Conference – a session,
something someone said or did or wrote – that will change the way you
think about science communication, or something that you will take with
you to your job, blog-reading and blog-writing?
Dave Mungeris
my hero – his blogging 102 session was packed with practical tips that I
brought back to C&EN for incorporating into our blogs, such as the
use of the Disqus plugin for catching conversations on social networks,
getting smart about using stats and surveys, etc. Some of that’s already
happened, and some of the ideas are still in the works.
I came
for the nuts-and-bolts blogging tips but I stayed for the conversations,
especially the ones at the bar after the official program was done for
the night. And the icing on the cake was seeing folks I’d worked with
but never met, like Cameron Neylon and you, Bora, and catching up with
people I hadn’t seen in months, like Jean-Claude Bradley, Aaron Rowe,
Jennifer Ouellette and Nancy Shute.
It was so nice to meet you in person and thank you for the interview. I hope to see you again next January.
Fall 2006
Back row: Junjia Liu, Carmen Drahl, Joel Freundlich, Adam Charnley, Jess Frie, Doug McLeod, Jay Schneekloth
Front row: Qian Qin, Jimin Kim, Hao Xie, Jillian Spangler, Julia Clay, Rachel MacCoss, Annie Nalbandian, Erik Sorensen
Spring 2005
Back row: Erik Alexanian, Jason Rohde, Brian Goess, Christoph Zapf, Steve Miller, David Richard, Jamie McBean
Middle row: Glenn Sammis, Hao Xie, Eric Flamme, Rachel MacCoss, Amanda Menco, Sy-Yeu Chern, Amanda Chi, Ryan Foss
Front row: Jeff Celaje, Qihui Jin, Bob Moreau, Jeewoo Lim, Carmen Drahl, Jimin Kim, Annie Nalbandian, Erik Sorensen
Spring 2004
Back row: Jeewoo Lim, William Shipe, Eric Flamme, Steve Miller, Bryce Harrison, Christoph Zapf
Front row: Erik Sorensen, Jeff Celaje, Bob Moreau, Erik Alexanian, Carmen Drahl, Jason Rohde
Company: GlaxoSmithKline
Meant to treat: tumors with loss-of-function in the tumor suppressor
protein PTEN (phosphatase and tensin homolog)- 2nd most inactivated
tumor suppressor after p53- cancers where this is often the case include
prostate and endometrial
Mode of action: inhibitor of
phosphoinositide 3-kinase-beta (PI3K-beta). Several lines of evidence
suggest that proliferation in certain PTEN-deficient tumor cell lines is
driven primarily by PI3K-beta.
Medicinal chemistry tidbits: The GSK
team seemed boxed in because in 3 out of 4 animals used in preclinical
testing, promising drug candidates had high clearance. It turned out
that a carbonyl group that they thought was critical for interacting
with the back pocket of the PI3K-beta enzyme wasn’t so critical after
all. When they realized they could replace the carbonyl with a variety
of functional groups, GSK2636771 eventually emerged. GSK2636771B (shown)
is the tris salt of GSK2636771.
Status in the pipeline: Phase I clinical trials……….http://cenblog.org/the-haystack/2012/03/liveblogging-first-time-disclosures-from-acssandiego/
CARMEN
Posted By Carmen Drahl on Mar 24, 2012
Phone: 202-872-4502
Fax: 202-872-8727 or -6381
Company: GlaxoSmithKline
Meant to treat: tumors with loss-of-function in the tumor suppressor
protein PTEN (phosphatase and tensin homolog)- 2nd most inactivated
tumor suppressor after p53- cancers where this is often the case include
prostate and endometrial
Mode of action: inhibitor of
phosphoinositide 3-kinase-beta (PI3K-beta). Several lines of evidence
suggest that proliferation in certain PTEN-deficient tumor cell lines is
driven primarily by PI3K-beta.
Medicinal chemistry tidbits: The GSK
team seemed boxed in because in 3 out of 4 animals used in preclinical
testing, promising drug candidates had high clearance. It turned out
that a carbonyl group that they thought was critical for interacting
with the back pocket of the PI3K-beta enzyme wasn’t so critical after
all. When they realized they could replace the carbonyl with a variety
of functional groups, GSK2636771 eventually emerged. GSK2636771B (shown)
is the tris salt of GSK2636771.
Status in the pipeline: Phase I clinical trials……….http://cenblog.org/the-haystack/2012/03/liveblogging-first-time-disclosures-from-acssandiego/
CARMEN
Posted By Carmen Drahl on Mar 24, 2012
Phone: 202-872-4502
Fax: 202-872-8727 or -6381
Washington, D.C.
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