Joe Palca
Joe Palca is a science correspondent for NPR. Since joining NPR in 1992, Palca has covered a range of science topics — everything from biomedical research to astronomy. He is currently focused on the eponymous series, "Joe's Big Idea." Stories in the series explore the minds and motivations of scientists and inventors. Palca is also the founder of NPR Scicommers – A science communication collective.
Palca began his journalism career in television in 1982, working as a health producer for the CBS affiliate in Washington, DC. In 1986, he left television for a seven-year stint as a print journalist, first as the Washington news editor for Nature, and then as a senior correspondent for Science Magazine.
In October 2009, Palca took a six-month leave from NPR to become science writer in residence at The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens.
Palca has won numerous awards, including the National Academies Communications Award, the Science-in-Society Award of the National Association of Science Writers, the American Chemical Society's James T. Grady-James H. Stack Award for Interpreting Chemistry for the Public, the American Association for the Advancement of Science Journalism Prize, and the Victor Cohn Prize for Excellence in Medical Writing. In 2019, Palca was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences for outstanding achievement in journalism.
With Flora Lichtman, Palca is the co-author of Annoying: The Science of What Bugs Us (Wiley, 2011).
He comes to journalism from a science background, having received a Ph.D. in psychology from the University of California at Santa Cruz, where he worked on human sleep physiology.
-
NASA's next big space telescope costs $8 billion and is very heavy. New York scientists think they may have found the makings of a cheaper, lighter answer for future space scopes — in a crafts store. -
Most telescope cameras can only capture a small patch of sky at a time. But a new camera has a much larger field of view, and its backers are hoping for help in deciphering its reams of data. -
Dr. Prabhjot Singh lives and works in Harlem, a neighborhood plagued by chronic disease. He thinks an African model of health care can help — training people in the community to be health educators. -
Farmers want tomato varieties that yield more fruit. Consumers want tastier ones. How to resolve that tension? A new genetic toolkit could help growers maximize the best of both worlds. -
Bryan Shaw showed it was possible to detect early signs of eye cancer from a family photo album. Now, he and his research team have made an iPhone app. -
Jennifer Doudna used to worry that her science wasn't doing anything important. Then some basic research led her team to a discovery that could one day be crucial in healing some genetic diseases. -
When blood flows over an artificial surface, whether it's an implanted pacemaker or tubing for a dialysis machine, there's an increased risk that a dangerous clot will form. -
Scientists hope NASA's MAVEN probe, which went into orbit Sunday night, will provide insight into why the Martian climate changed drastically billions of years ago. -
You think bringing a new toothbrush to market is easy? The seven-year saga of two dental entrepreneurs struggling to bring their patented brush to consumers suggests otherwise. -
If you think that an artificial eye looks like a big glass marble, you're not alone. And you're wrong. We visit the people who made a prosthetic eye for a 5-year-old boy who lost an eye to cancer.
