David Baron is a science journalist, broadcaster, lecturer, author and former Ted Scripps fellow. His 2017 book, American Eclipse—praised by the Wall Street Journal as “a sweeping, compelling portrait of the scientific and social aspirations of Gilded Age Americans”—tells the story of a total solar eclipse that traversed the American West in 1878. The book and Baron’s related TEDx talk (viewed well over a million times online) helped spur public excitement for the recent total eclipse that crossed the nation on August 21, 2017.
A former environment correspondent for NPR and former health and science editor for the public radio program The World, Baron has reported from every continent and has earned some of the top honors in broadcast journalism—including the Lowell Thomas Award from the Overseas Press Club of America, the Alfred I. duPont Award from Columbia University, the National Academies Communications Award, and, on three occasions, the annual journalism prize from the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Baron’s written work has appeared in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Boston Globe, Outside, Daily Beast, Lonely Planet, and Reader’s Digest. While a Ted Scripps Fellow at CU in 1998-99, Baron began research for his first book, The Beast in the Garden. An exploration of the growing conflict between people and wildlife in suburban America, it investigates events that culminated in Colorado’s first fatal mountain lion attack, in 1991, and was honored with the Colorado Book Award in 2003.