Debbie Ponchner

Debbie Ponchner is a bilingual science journalist with over 15 years of experience in print and digital media, and newsroom management. Originally from Costa Rica, she started out as a science reporter for La Nación, the newspaper of record for the country. In 2005, she founded and served as editor of the first daily science section of La Nación. Later, she was the newspaper’s managing editor and wrote its weekly science column. She moved to New York in 2014 to create and lead the Spanish-language website of Scientific American. She has won several journalism awards, including Costa Rica’s National Journalism Prize, the Jorge Vargas-Gené Award, in 2002 and 2005 as well as the National Scientific Journalism Prize, given by the National Council for Science and Technology of Costa Rica in 2002, 2005 and 2008. She studied mass communication at the University of Costa Rica, specializing in science communication at Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona, Spain. She spent the 2003-04 academic year as a Knight Science Journalism Fellow at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 2016, she was elected to the board of the Council for the Advancement of Science Writing.