ScienceOnline is first and foremost a community made up of thousands of scientists, journalists, librarians, educators, students and others. Each one has a voice, and all voices are welcome to participate in our online and face-to-face conversations, conferences and other events.
We’re also a nonprofit corporation, and this is our leadership team:
Karyn Traphagen
Executive Director
@ktraphagen
karyn@scienceonline.com
Karyn is executive director and co-founder of ScienceOnline, and was co-organizer of the precursor conferences ScienceOnline2012 and ScienceOnline2011. She is acutely focused on supporting our global community in creative and responsive ways. She dreams possibilities for conversations and collaborations, digs into the details, and listens to your ideas – among the many reasons Karyn received the 2011 BlogTogether Community Service Award. She recruited SciOctopus to be our mascot.
Karyn has a graphic design studio, volunteers at a local science museum, and tells stories about her mother’s postcards. She previously taught physics at the high school, undergraduate and graduate levels. As a teacher, she sought to connect the science of the curriculum with the everyday life of her students and to instill lifelong skills for learning. Karyn completed graduate work at the University of Virginia and also studied at the University of Stellenbosch (South Africa). She has trained physics teachers through the University of Virginia’s Physics department and traveled to South Sudan to conduct professional development training for local teachers. She has more than 10 years of experience developing and teaching online courses, and she’s summited the 46 major Adirondack peaks.
Karyn lives in Durham, North Carolina in a house filled with Lego, books, a 3-D printer and lots of other toys. She writes about creativity on her blog, Stay Curious.
Board of Directors
Anton Zuiker
Chairman and Treasurer
@mistersugar
Anton is director of communications in the Duke University Department of Medicine. A longtime blogger and an early adopter of social media, Anton is co-founder of ScienceOnline, and with Bora was creator and co-organizer of the annual precursor ScienceOnline conferences.
Anton earned a master’s degree in medical journalism from the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where his thesis reporting project was a 12,000-word narrative magazine feature on a rise in HIV among college students in North Carolina. Before that, he’d spent two years as a Peace Corps Volunteer in the South Pacific nation of Vanuatu, an experience that gave him his nickname and that continues to inspire his personal blogging at mistersugar.com. He lives in Carrboro, North Carolina.
Bora Zivkovic
Vice Chairman and Secretary
@boraz
Bora is blog editor at Scientific American. He’s also known as the Blogfather in recognition of his tireless efforts to promote the works and careers of new writers, students, scientists and artists. It was his idea that led to the ScienceOnline conferences, and his tireless networking that seeded the ScienceOnline community. He also is the creator and series editor of Open Laboratory – the annual anthology of the best writing on science blogs.
A native of Belgrade, Yugoslavia (now Serbia), Bora was always interested in animals and nature. His studies in veterinary medicine were interrupted by the 1990s war in the Balkans, when he arrived in the USA. He went to graduate school at North Carolina State University, where he studied how bird brains measure time of day (circadian rhythms) and time of year (photoperiodism). He started his science blog, A Blog Around The Clock, in 2004.
Bora teaches introductory biology to non-traditional students at North Carolina Wesleyan College. Although he’s posted more than 100,000 tweets and regularly writes very long and very insightful blog posts, he does find time to sleep and walk in his Pittsboro, North Carolina neighborhood.
Additional board members are being recruited.
