Rebecca Priestley
Rebecca Priestley is an award-winning science writer and historian, with degrees in earth sciences and a doctorate in the history and philosophy of science. She is a senior lecturer in the Science and Society group at Victoria University of Wellington and a former science columnist for New Zealand Listener. Her most recent book is Dispatches from Continent Seven: An anthology of Antarctic science. She first travelled to the ice on Antarctica New Zealand’s media programme in 2011, and in 2014 filmed lectures there for Antarctica Online, an innovative course available to students around the world.
Her previous books include The Awa Book of New Zealand Science, winner of the inaugural Royal Society of New Zealand Science Book Prize, Atoms, Dinosaurs and DNA: 68 Great New Zealand Scientists (with Veronika Meduna), winner of the LIANZA Elsie Locke Award for Non-fiction, Mad on Radium: New Zealand in the Atomic Age, and The Fukushima Effect: A New Geopolitical Terrain (with Richard Hindmarsh). In 2016 she was awarded the $100,000 Prime Minister’s Science Communication Prize. The prize money supported her to found and launch the Aotearoa-NZ Science Journalism Fund to assist quality science journalism projects in New Zealand. In 2018 she was made a Companion of the Royal Society Te Aparangi in 2018 in recognition of her work over more than 25 years to promote science issues to the New Zealand public.
