Ángela Posada-Swafford is an award-winning Colombian-American science, environment and exploration journalist, lecturer, moderator and book author. She has participated in many international research expeditions, and has been writing stories on Antarctica, astrophysics, space, rocketry and astronautics; environment, energy, biodiversity, climate change, health, life sciences, neurophysiology, genetics, geology, oceanography, paleontology, cave science, deep sea mining, technology and exploration for 30 years for all media platforms, digital, print and broadcast, in Spanish and English. She has been a speaker in TEDx, and is engaged in giving public talks at Colombian embassies throughout the world on diplomacy of science and communicating science. She has given science/health communication seminars for Roche and the Gabriel Garcia Marquez Foundation in Colombia and Mexico. She engages with audiences of all ages.
She collaborates with NASA, the National Science Foundation, the European Southern Observatory, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, the Marine Biological Laboratory, the Colombian Navy, the Lindau Nobel Prize Meetings in Germany, the Kavli Prize in Norway, and many more organizations to accompany scientists in the field and in their exotic labs, writing for Muy Interesante magazines in Mexico and Spain, Nature, Scientific American, El Tiempo newspaper in Colombia, Semana magazine, WIRED, Astronomy, Discovery Channel, National Geographic, The Boston Globe, National Public Radio, El Universal newspaper in Mexico, and Revista Cómo Ves? from Mexico’s UNAM, among others.
Her recent awards include the 2017 Premio Simón Bolívar, Colombia’s top journalism prize. She was the first Hispanic journalist to receive the Knight Fellowship in Science Journalism at MIT/Harvard, and has served as blogger in six Antarctic/South Pole expeditions both with NSF, NASA and the Colombian and Chilean Antarctic Programs. She has been instrumental in connecting and serving as a liaison among Colombia’s Antarctic Program, the National Science Foundation and the Antarctic programs of Chile and the United States. She actively connects scientists in the US and Europe with scientists in Latin America.
Her latest book “Ice: Journal of an Antarctic Expeditionary”, was published by Editorial Planeta in November 2018. It gathers her experiences living in several research stations in the geographic South Pole, in remote camps and in the Antarctic Peninsula, as well as flying low over the continent with NASA’s IceBridge mission.
She is the author of Juntos en la Aventura (Editorial Planeta) a popular collection of 8 science and adventure novels for young adults which is being read in schools throughout Colombia and China (translated into Mandarin), because they teach science but through fiction plots.
She is a senior lecturer and trainer for science students, researchers and journalists, and is an advisor in science communication for the Doctorate Sciences Program at Universidad de Los Andes, one of Colombia’s leading private universities. Until recently she worked with the Colombian government’s Colciencias, teaching science writing workshops, and identifying and popularizing valuable research in the nation, taking difficult concepts to lay audiences. She created and serves as editorial advisor of Intellecta, the science magazine at Universidad del Norte, in Barranquilla. Selected to participate in 2020 Science & Society Program: Aspen Global Congress on Scientific Thinking and Action.