Thomas Hayden is Director of the Master of Arts in Earth Systems, Environmental Communication Program at Stanford University. He teaches science and environmental communication and journalism in Stanford’s School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences and Graduate Program in Journalism. He came to Stanford in 2008, following a career of reporting and writing about science and environmental issues for national and international publications.

Hayden’s journalism career began at Newsweek magazine in New York, where he was an American Association for the Advancement of Science Mass Media fellow in 1997. In 2000, he moved to US News & World Report in Washington, DC, where he covered science, the environment, medicine, culture and breaking news as a senior writer. Since 2005, Hayden has been a freelance journalist. His cover stories have appeared in publications including Wired, Smithsonian, National Geographic, Washington Post Book World and many others. He has reported from South America, Europe, and Asia; and North America from New Orleans to the Canadian Arctic.

Hayden is coauthor of two books. He wrote the 2007 national bestseller On Call in Hell, about battlefield medicine in Iraq, with Navy doctor Richard Jadick. In 2008 he collaborated on the critically acclaimed Sex and War, about the biological evolution and cultural development of warfare through human history, with Malcolm Potts of the University of California, Berkeley. He was the lead writer on the 2010 9th revision of the iconic National Geographic Atlas of the World. And he was coeditor of and a contributor to The Science Writers’ Handbook: Everything You Need to Know to Pitch, Publish and Prosper in the Digital Age, published in 2013.

In 2005, Hayden taught science writing in The Writing Workshops at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore with his wife and fellow science journalist, Erika Check Hayden. He was a founding faculty member in the annual Banff Centre Science Communications workshop, where he taught from 2006 until 2010, and was involved as a speaker and trainer with the Leopold Leadership Program for environmental scientists from 2000 to 2013.

Hayden graduated from his hometown school, the University of Saskatchewan, with a Bachelor of Science in Agriculture (honours) degree in applied microbiology and food science, and received an MS degree in marine biology from the University of Southern California. He completed five years of doctoral study in biological oceanography at USC, before leaving science for journalism with A.B.D. status. He spent more than nine months at sea cumulatively over five years, conducting oceanographic research from Southern California to San Francisco Bay, and from Antarctica to Easter Island.

In 2015, Hayden helped launch a new graduate degree program in Stanford’s School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences. The Master of Arts in Earth Systems, Environmental Communication degree is focussed on the study and practice of effective, engaging, accurate communication of complex environmental and Earth systems information to nonspecialist audiences.

E’jaaz A. Mason is a Lecturer in Earth Systems at Stanford University teaching courses about community-engaged multimedia environmental storytelling. He is also the Co-Founder of Lede New Orleans, a nonprofit fostering community engagement and young adult media production training. A filmmaker, educator, and community engagement specialist, Mason was a member of the 2023-2024 John S. Knight Journalism Fellowship at Stanford. From 2015 to 2020, he taught film and digital media in New Orleans public high schools, founding an award-winning film program at New Orleans Charter Math & Science High School. Mason has received numerous awards for his work in youth education. He was a cinematographer for the 2022 HBO/Time Studios documentary Katrina Babies and is the Story and Impact Producer for the 2027 documentary The River. He is also directing two documentary films: Black Suit: Sewing [Her]story, which highlights the importance of Black women in New Orleans’ Black Masking Indian culture and an untitled film about environmental and societal challenges facing residents of the Bayview Hunter’s Point neighborhood in San Francisco.

Kevin C. Moore is a Lecturer in the Program in Writing and Rhetoric. He holds a PhD in English from UCLA (2013). Prior to arriving at Stanford, he taught in the Writing Program at the University of California, Santa Barbara (2013-2019). His research interests include propaganda studies, science and rhetoric, Ralph Ellison, and writer’s block. Dr. Moore’s work has appeared in Arizona Quarterly, Arts, Writing on the Edge, African American Review, Composition Studies, MAKE, Souciant, and the Santa Barbara Independent, as well as collections such as Ralph Ellison in Context (Cambridge University Press 2021) and Creative Ways of Knowing in Engineering (Springer 2017). He also writes fiction and creative nonfiction.

Emily Polk is a writer, teacher, scholar, and mother who teaches and writes about community-led responses to climate change, the mobilization of social movements, and climate equity. She developed and taught some of the first courses at Stanford University on Gender and Climate Change, Communicating Climate Change, and Environmental Justice Storytelling. Prior to getting her doctorate, she worked as a human rights and environment–focused writer and editor for nearly ten years around the world, helping to produce radio documentaries in Burmese refugee camps, and facilitating a human rights-based newspaper in a Liberian refugee camp. She has also worked as an editor at Whole Earth Magazine and at CSRwire, a leading global source of corporate social responsibility news. Her own writing and radio documentaries have appeared in National Geographic Traveler, the Boston Globe, NPR, The National Radio Project, AlterNet, Central America Weekly, the Ghanaian Chronicle, and Creative Nonfiction, among others. Her book, Communicating Global to Local Resiliency: A Case Study of the Transition Movement, was released in 2015. Her recent article, “Communicating Climate Change: What went wrong, how can we do better?” was published in the Handbook of Communication for Development and Social Change and is used in classrooms in the US and around the world.

She is an Advanced Lecturer in the Program in Writing and Rhetoric and has a Ph.D. in Communication from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and a Masters in Human Rights from Columbia University. Emily’s courses focus on global development, climate change, and environmental justice, and invite students to interrogate the discourses (and assumptions) around the approaches, methods, and ideologies regarding how and when social change happens.