2016 AAAS Annual Meeting (February 11-15, 2016)

February 10 - 15, 2016

Jad Abumrad

Host and Producer Radiolab The son of a scientist and a doctor, Jad Abumrad studied creative writing and music composition at Oberlin College in Ohio. He has written music for films and reported and produced documentaries for a variety of local and national public radio programs, including On The Media, Studio 360 with Kurt Andersen, Morning Edition, All Things Considered and WNYC’s “24 Hours at the Edge of Ground Zero.” While working at WNYC, he began tinkering with an idea for a new kind of radio program. That idea evolved into one of public radio’s most popular shows today – Radiolab. Abumrad hosts the program with Robert Krulwich and also serves as one of its producers. Radiolab explores big questions in science, philosophy, and mankind and has been recognized with the George Foster Peabody Award and AAAS-Kavli Science Journalism Award, among others. The show uses a combination of deep-dive journalism, narrative storytelling, dialogue, and music to craft compositions of exploration and discovery. Radiolab podcasts are downloaded over 4 million times each month, and the program is carried on 437 stations across the United States. Abumrad was honored as a 2011 MacArthur Fellow for “inspiring boundless curiosity within a new generation of listeners and experimenting with sound to find ever more effective and entertaining ways to explain ideas and tell a story.”