The team behind the award-winning bi-monthly print magazine, COSMOS, the biggest-selling Australian science magazine; and Cosmos Online, the news and features site.
Visit our MEDIA ROOM for news clippings, interviews and press releases about COSMOS. To submit articles or portfolios for consideration by the editors, visit the SUBMISSIONS page here.
Editor
Wilson da Silva is a former on-air reporter for ABC TV's Quantum program, was editor of the magazines Newton and 21C, science editor of ABC Online, has been a foreign correspondent for Reuters, a staff journalist on The Age and Sydney Morning Herald newspapers and was a correspondent for New Scientist. The winner of 26 awards - including Editor of the Year (twice in a row) for his work on COSMOS, and the Australian Film Institute Award for Best Documentary for The Diplomat - he is a member of the board of the World Federation of Science Journalists, and its immediate past president. He is scheduled to be among the first 100 citizen astronauts to fly on Virgin Galactic's spaceliner service when flights begin in 2009.
Deputy Editor/Online Editor
John Pickrell has been a science journalist and editor for the past eight years. Formerly an editor at New Scientist in London, he has been a reporter for the magazines Science and Science News, and regularly wrote for National Geographic's online news service and BBC Wildlife magazine. A graduate in biology from Imperial College, he has a masters from London's Natural History Museum where he revelled in exploring its hidden depths. He lived in Washington DC for a year in 2002, and is currently developing an encyclopaedic knowledge of Sydney beach life. In 2008 he took out a highly commended certificate for Best Single Article at the annual Bell Magazine Awards for a COSMOS feature on an ancient sunken reef discovered beneath Australia's Barrier Reef.
Art Director
Valter DiCecco has been a graphic designer for more than 12 years, working across publishing, finished artwork and conceptual design. He began his career as in print production at the advertising agency M&C Sattchi, working on accounts such as Optus, before finding his métier in publishing. His magazine credits include Australian Good Taste, Two Wheels, Modern Fishing and The Diplomat, among others. He is the winner of the 2008 Best Magazine Supplement for The Green Book, an annual products and services directory produced for COSMOS' sister title, G Magazine.
Senior Sub-editor
Kate Arneman applies good grammar and polish to articles, as well as keeping the magazine production line running. A fluent German speaker, she completed a combined Bachelor of Arts in communications and international studies at the University of Technology in Sydney, which included two semesters at the University of Konstanz in Germany. She has worked as a freelance researcher for FilmWorld and Michael Chugg Entertainment, and landed her first sub-editing job at Marie Claire where she served for two years before making a quantum leap from fashion to physics.
Picture Editor and Staff Writer
Sarah Wood is fresh out of university with a Bachelor of Science Communication in ecology from the University of New South Wales in Sydney. A former editor of the university's online science engineering and technology review, OnSET, she worked as a presenter and helped develop the institution's science outreach shows for schools. She served as one of Luna Media's first publishing cadets in 2006, becoming Editorial & Marketing Assistant before being promoted into the picture researcher's role and being promoted to Picture Editor, where she helps arrange photo shoots and finds all those great images used in the magazine.
Sub-editor, Staff Writer and Reviews Editor
Jacqui Hayes tries to hide her unnatural obsession with physics in her day-to-day life, often with little success. With a bachelor of advanced science in physics from the University of Sydney, she forayed into the magazine world in 2006 with a three-week internship at COSMOS magazine. Later, she continued writing for COSMOS while performing travelling science shows in schools and fairs around Australia with the Questacon Science Circus, before finally landing a job at the magazine. Now she fixes and tinkers with articles, and still writes the odd article herself.
Fiction Editor
Damien Broderick is one of Australia's most renowned science fiction writers, and has served as the magazine's fiction editor since its inception. A novelist, futurist, critical theorist and a senior research fellow at the University of Melbourne, he holds a doctorate from Deakin University in the comparative semiotics of science and literature. Credited with inventing the term 'virtual reality', his SF writing has been recognised with five Ditmar and three Aurealis awards, most recently the 2007 Aurealis Award for Best Science Fiction Novel for K-Machines. He's also the recipient of the 2005 Distinguished Scholarship Award from the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts.
Contributing Editor, London
Robin McKie has been science editor of Britain's The Observer since 1982 and has written a number of successful books, including Panic: The Story of AIDS, Genetic Jigsaw and The Dawn of Man. He resides in London with his wife and three children, and spends much of his free time watching his favourite football team, the Glasgow Rangers.
Contributing Editor, Melbourne
Elizabeth Finkel is a former research biochemist who took up science journalism. One of the founders of COSMOS, she is the Australian correspondent for the prestigious U.S. journal, Science, and her articles have appeared in a range of publications from The Lancet and Nature Medicine to The Age and Sydney Morning Herald newspapers. She is the author of Stem Cells: Controversy on the Frontiers of Science, for which she won a Queensland Premier’s Literary Award in 2004. Her work for COSMOS was recognised in 2007 with two Bell Magazine Awards: Best Single Article and Best Analytical Article.
Contributing Editor, Ottawa
Peter Calamai is the national science reporter for the Toronto Star. He’s been a foreign correspondent in Europe, the Soviet bloc, the Middle East, Washington DC and more than 35 countries in Africa. Assignments have included armed conflicts, Apollo missions, natural disasters and more election campaigns than he’d care to recall. The winner of numerous journalism awards, he’s a graduate in physics from McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. In April 2008, he won the Peter Kirkby Memorial Medal for Outstanding Service to Canadian Physics, awarded every two years by the Canadian Association of Physicists.
