NPR People
Christopher Joyce, NPR Biography
Correspondent, Science Desk
Photo: Steve Barrett
Christopher Joyce is a correspondent on the science desk at NPR. His stories can be heard on all of NPR's news programs, including NPR's Morning Edition, All Things Considered, and Weekend Edition. In addition to his work with the science desk, Joyce is the editor and a correspondent for NPR's Radio Expeditions, a documentary program on natural history and disappearing cultures produced in collaboration with the National Geographic Society that can be heard frequently on Morning Edition.
Joyce explains, "I came to NPR in 1993 as a part-time editor while finishing a book about tropical rainforests for Little, Brown and Co., and fell in love with radio." For two years, Joyce worked on NPR's national desk and was responsible for NPR's Western coverage. But his interest in science and technology soon launched him into parallel work on NPR's science desk. Over the course of his career, Joyce has written stories about volcanoes, the nation's epidemic of algae blooms, tagging giant blue-fin tuna, the design of Whitbread racing yachts, and the artificial insemination of an African elephant. In addition, he has written two non-fiction books on scientific topics for the popular market: Witnesses from the Grave: The Stories Bones Tell, (with co-author Eric Stover); and Earthly Goods: Medicine-Hunting in the Rainforest. Before coming to NPR, Joyce was for ten years the U.S. correspondent and editor for the British weekly magazine New Scientist.
Joyce seeks out stories in some of the world's most inaccessible places. He has reported from remote villages in the Amazonian and Central American rainforests, Tibetan outposts in the mountains of western China, and the bottom of an abandoned copper mine in Michigan's Upper Peninsula. His stories on forensic investigations into the massacres in Kosovo and Bosnia were part of NPR's war coverage that won a 1999 Overseas Press Club award. He was part of the Radio Expeditions reporting and editing team that won the 2001 Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University journalism award and the 2001 Sigma Delta Chi award from the Society of Professional Journalists. Joyce also won the 2001 American Association for the Advancement of Science excellence in journalism award.
Joyce lives on the south bank of the Severn River, near Annapolis, Maryland, and spends as much time as possible fishing, canoeing, and sailing on the Chesapeake Bay.
