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The fool folds his hands and eats his own flesh. Kohelet 4:5 |
Ira Flatow (born March 9, 1949) is a radio and television journalist and author who hosts National Public Radio's popular Science Friday. He is probably best known on TV for hosting Newton's Apple, a television science program for children and their families.
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Flatow was born into a Jewish family in Brooklyn, New York, where his first experience with a television news program was in his high school. He was a cameraman for the daily news program at H. Frank Carey High School in Franklin Square, New York. In 1967, however, Flatow entered college to pursue an engineering degree at the State University of New York at Buffalo, where he received his bachelor's degree in 1971 in civil engineering. In 1969, he began working in radio at WBFO, in Buffalo, New York and his first news experience was covering antiwar speeches, demonstrations and campus riots at SUNY Buffalo in 1970. Flatow's first science stories were created in 1970 during the first Earth Day. In 1971, he became the news director of WBFO.
Flatow was hired by the newly-formed National Public Radio in Washington, DC in 1971 by Bill Siemering who was his former employer at WBFO in Buffalo and the first NPR program director and creator of the NPR flagship program "All Things Considered...". In Washington he covered the environment, health and medicine news, and technology stories. While at NPR, Flatow helped found the NPR science unit and served on the production team for NPR's first remote broadcast: the UN Conference On the Human Environment in Stockholm.
As producer and science correspondent from 1971 to 1986, Flatow found himself reporting from the Kennedy Space Center, Three Mile Island, Antarctica and the South Pole. A photograph of Flatow "interviewing" penguins in Antarctica in 1979 became an icon of his career. In another memorable event, Flatow took former All Things Considered host Susan Stamberg into a closet to crunch Wint-O-Green Lifesavers, proving they spark in the dark.
In 1991 he began to host the Friday edition of Talk of the Nation which became known as Science Friday. Flatow pioneered NPR's entry into the digital world becoming the first radio program to be nationally "broadcast" on the Internet in 1993 and the first to be podcast. Science Friday is also the home for the annual radio broadcast of the Ig Nobel Prize awards, heard each Friday following Thanksgiving.
From 1982 through 1987 he hosted the Emmy Award PBS science program Newton's Apple, which originated at KTCA in St. Paul, Minnesota. In 1991, he wrote and reported science and technology for CBS News' "CBS This Morning." Flatow has discussed the latest cutting edge science stories on a variety of programs, including the Cablevision program Maximum Science . He is also host of the four-part PBS series Big Ideas produced by WNET in New York. His numerous TV credits include science reporter Westinghouse, and cable's CNBC. He wrote, produced and hosted "Transistorized!", an hour-long documentary about the history of the transistor, which aired on PBS. He has talked science on many TV talk shows including Merv Griffin, Today, Charlie Rose, and Oprah.
Flatow is founder and president of the Science Friday Initiative (previously TalkingScience) a non-profit company dedicated to creating radio, TV, and Internet projects that make science "user friendly."
In 2009, Flatow had a cameo appearance as himself in The Vengeance Formulation in the CBS sitcom The Big Bang Theory. In the episode, Flatow interviews Sheldon Cooper (Jim Parsons) on his research on magnetic monopoles.
Public speaking and moderating discussions are a regular part of his schedule. As a host, he has emceed many public events, including the 100th Anniversary Celebration of the Science Museum of Minnesota (2007). He has spoken at Rockefeller University, the World Economic Forum, Sun Microsystems, Hewlett Packard, Calvin Academy, Caltech, MIT, Google, Harvard, University of Wisconsin, OSHU, National Inventors Hall of Fame, Kentucky Author Forum, and TEDxGotham. In 2004, Ira was resident scholar at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute.
Ira Flatow
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