On Wednesday, Oct. 8 at 7 p.m. in Spiro 2, please join the Wagner College community for the 2014 Kaufman-Repage Lecture, being delivered this year by Pulitzer Prize-winning environmental reporter and NYU professor Dan Fagin. Fagin won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction for his book, “Toms River: A Story of Science and Salvation” (Bantam, 2013).
A complete video of the lecture will be broadcast on the Wagner College website later this week.
Fagin is an associate professor of journalism at New York University’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute and the director of the masters-level Science, Health and Environmental Reporting Program, one of the oldest and best-regarded science journalism training programs in the world.
A native of Oklahoma City, Fagin attended Dartmouth College, where he was the editor-in-chief and president of the college newspaper. He spent two years at the Sarasota Herald-Tribune before joining Newsday, where he covered local and state politics before becoming the environment writer. Fagin was a principal member of two Newsday reporting teams that were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize. His stories on cancer epidemiology in 2003 won both of the best-known science journalism prizes in the United States, from the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the National Association of Science Writers. He is also the co-author of the book “Toxic Deception” (1997), which was a finalist for the Investigative Reporters and Editors book-of-the-year award. He joined the NYU faculty in 2005.
Fagin has been a Templeton-Cambridge Fellow in Science and Religion at Cambridge University and has held fellowships at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Mass., and the Institute of Arctic Biology in Toolik Lake, Alaska. He is a former president of the 1,500-member Society of Environmental Journalists, the oldest and largest association of journalists dedicated to improving the quality, accuracy and visibility of environmental coverage.
Dan Fagin lives on Long Island with his wife, the legal journalist Alison Frankel. They have two grown daughters and a surfeit of cats.
For more about Dan Fagin, visit his website.
THE KAUFMAN-REPAGE LECTURE, a celebration of Wagner College’s commitment to scholarly work and open inquiry, is sponsored by former Wagner College trustee Dr. Louise S. Kaufman ’75 M’78 H’12 and her husband, Dr. Peter Kaufman. They established the lecture series eight years ago with the goal of bringing noted speakers to campus and the community. Past speakers have included former U.S. poet laureate Billy Collins; Ken Jackson, professor of history and social science at Columbia University; Rebecca Skloot, author of the award-winning book, “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks”; Bonnie Bassler, Squibb Professor of Molecular Biology at Princeton University and a 2002 MacArthur Fellow, and Joel Kotkin, author of “The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050.”
Watch Jack Ford’s interview with Dan Fagin about “Toms River,” aired this summer on the WNET program, “Metro Focus”:
