Wilson da Silva
Encyclopedia
Australia
Australia , officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a country in the Southern Hemisphere comprising the mainland of the Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous smaller islands in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. It is the world's sixth-largest country by total area...
n science
Science
Science is a systematic enterprise that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe...
journalist
Journalist
A journalist collects and distributes news and other information. A journalist's work is referred to as journalism.A reporter is a type of journalist who researchs, writes, and reports on information to be presented in mass media, including print media , electronic media , and digital media A...
and editor who has worked in magazines, newswires, newspapers, television and online. He is editor and co-founder of Cosmos
Cosmos (magazine)
Cosmos is an Australian popular science magazine that is published six times a year. It is subtitled "the science of everything" and is described as "a magazine of ideas, science, society and the future"....
, Australia's #1 science magazine, and Cosmos Online, the country's #1 science news website.
He has been an on-air science reporter and producer for Australian Broadcasting Corporation
Australian Broadcasting Corporation
The Australian Broadcasting Corporation, commonly referred to as "the ABC" , is Australia's national public broadcaster...
television, a staff journalist on The Age
The Age
The Age is a daily broadsheet newspaper, which has been published in Melbourne, Australia since 1854. Owned and published by Fairfax Media, The Age primarily serves Victoria, but is also available for purchase in Tasmania, the Australian Capital Territory and border regions of South Australia and...
and The Sydney Morning Herald
The Sydney Morning Herald
The Sydney Morning Herald is a daily broadsheet newspaper published by Fairfax Media in Sydney, Australia. Founded in 1831 as the Sydney Herald, the SMH is the oldest continuously published newspaper in Australia. The newspaper is published six days a week. The newspaper's Sunday counterpart, The...
newspapers, a foreign correspondent for Reuters
Reuters
Reuters is a news agency headquartered in New York City. Until 2008 the Reuters news agency formed part of a British independent company, Reuters Group plc, which was also a provider of financial market data...
, science editor of ABC Online, a correspondent for London's New Scientist
New Scientist
New Scientist is a weekly non-peer-reviewed English-language international science magazine, which since 1996 has also run a website, covering recent developments in science and technology for a general audience. Founded in 1956, it is published by Reed Business Information Ltd, a subsidiary of...
magazine, and served as managing editor of the science magazines Newton, 21C and Science Spectra. From 2006-09, he was the founding editor-in-chief of G Magazine
G Magazine (Australia)
G magazine is an Australian consumer sustainability magazine, published in Sydney since November 2006. G magazine is a bi-monthly publication.Emma Bowen is G magazine's editor, and Caitlin Howlett is the features and online writer...
, an environmental consumer lifestyle title that was the country's first carbon neutral magazine and produced on 100% recycled paper.
He is the creator of HELLO FROM EARTH
Hello From Earth
HELLO FROM EARTH is an Interstellar Radio Message . It was sent from the 70-meter dish at NASA Deep Space Station 43 , at midday on Friday 28 August 2009...
, a web-based initiative to send messages from the public, each just 160 characters in length, to Gliese 581d, the nearest Earth-like planet outside the Solar System
Solar System
The Solar System consists of the Sun and the astronomical objects gravitationally bound in orbit around it, all of which formed from the collapse of a giant molecular cloud approximately 4.6 billion years ago. The vast majority of the system's mass is in the Sun...
. Created as a science communication exercise for 2009 National Science Week
National Science Week
National Science Week refers to series of science-related events for the general public which are held in a specific countries during a designated week of the year...
in Australia, it collected nearly 26,000 messages that were beamed by NASA
NASA
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration is the agency of the United States government that is responsible for the nation's civilian space program and for aeronautics and aerospace research...
's Canberra Deep Space Communication Complex
Canberra Deep Space Communication Complex
The Canberra Deep Space Communication Complex is a ground station that is located in Australia at Tidbinbilla in the Paddys River valley, about half an hour's drive out of Canberra in the Australian Capital Territory. The complex is part of the Deep Space Network run by NASA's Jet Propulsion...
on 28 August 2009.
The winner of 31 awards, including Editor of the Year (twice - in 2006 and 2005, Australia's Bell Awards for Publishing Excellence), the 1997 Human Rights Award for Print Journalism and the 1996 Michael Daley Award for Science Journalism. He has also written and produced two prize-winning documentaries, including The Diplomat, the film that depicted Nobel Peace laureate José Ramos-Horta and his eventually successful struggle to win independence for East Timor
East Timor
The Democratic Republic of Timor-Leste, commonly known as East Timor , is a state in Southeast Asia. It comprises the eastern half of the island of Timor, the nearby islands of Atauro and Jaco, and Oecusse, an exclave on the northwestern side of the island, within Indonesian West Timor...
. The film won da Silva and fellow producer Sally Browning the 2000 AFI Award for Best Documentary (Australian Film Institute).
A past president of the World Federation of Science Journalists, he is a former president of the Australian Science Communicators and of The Australian Museum Society, and has served on the board of the Australian Society of Authors. He is one of the founders of Science in the Pub, an innovative public communication initiative which was awarded the 2000 Eureka Prize for the Promotion of Science. In October 2009, da Silva created and hosted six Science in the Pub sessions for the Quantum to Cosmos festival at Perimeter Institute in Waterloo
Waterloo, Ontario
Waterloo is a city in Southern Ontario, Canada. It is the smallest of the three cities in the Regional Municipality of Waterloo, and is adjacent to the city of Kitchener....
, Ontario
Ontario
Ontario is a province of Canada, located in east-central Canada. It is Canada's most populous province and second largest in total area. It is home to the nation's most populous city, Toronto, and the nation's capital, Ottawa....
, and also hosted two Quantum to Cosmos panels. In his opening panel, he asked nine physicists, "what keeps you awake at night?"
He makes frequent appearances on radio and television in Australia, including breakfast TV shows Sunrise and Today, and has spoken at many public lectures and conferences, among them the UNESCO World Science Forum
World Science Forum
World Science Forum is an international conference series on global science policy. Since 2003, it is being organized biannually in Budapest, Hungary....
, the EuroScience Open Forum and Japan's annual Science and Technology in Society Forum. He is scheduled to be among the first passengers of Virgin Galactic
Virgin Galactic
Virgin Galactic is a company within Richard Branson's Virgin Group which plans to provide sub-orbital spaceflights to the paying public, along with suborbital space science missions and orbital launches of small satellites...
's space service when flights begin in 2012. Born in Brazil
Brazil
Brazil , officially the Federative Republic of Brazil , is the largest country in South America. It is the world's fifth largest country, both by geographical area and by population with over 192 million people...
, he now lives in Sydney
Sydney
Sydney is the most populous city in Australia and the state capital of New South Wales. Sydney is located on Australia's south-east coast of the Tasman Sea. As of June 2010, the greater metropolitan area had an approximate population of 4.6 million people...
, Australia.
External links
- Personal website of Wilson da Silva
- Cosmos, the Australian popular science magazine
- G Magazine in Australia.
- http://q2cfestival.com/science_pub Science in the Pub
- World Federation of Science Journalists website
- http://q2cfestival.com/program Quantum to Cosmos
- Quantum to Cosmos Opening Panel