Christopher Joyce
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.
Joyce seeks out stories in some of the world's most inaccessible places. He has reported from remote villages in the Amazon 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. Over the course of his career, Joyce has written stories about volcanoes, hurricanes, human evolution, tagging giant blue-fin tuna, climate change, wars in Kosovo and Iraq, and the artificial insemination of an African elephant.
For several years, Joyce was an editor and correspondent for NPR's Radio Expeditions, a documentary program on natural history and disappearing cultures produced in collaboration with the National Geographic Society that was heard frequently on Morning Edition.
Joyce came to NPR in 1993 as a part-time editor while finishing a book about tropical rainforests and, as he says, "I just 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.
In addition, Joyce 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 worked for ten years as the U.S. correspondent and editor for the British weekly magazine New Scientist.
Joyce's 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 won the 2001 American Association for the Advancement of Science excellence in journalism award as well as the 2016 Communication Award from the National Academies of Sciences.
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The idea of plumes of moisture curling above our heads might seem beautiful, but new research shows atmospheric rivers to be among the most damaging of weather systems. -
Tiny creatures in the Mariana Trench have high levels of industrial contamination. The new findings suggest that even Earth's most remote locales feel the effects of human beings. -
The country's single biggest source of climate information is the federal government. What happens if a Trump administration tries to censor it? -
Scientists concede that oil and gas production is only partly to blame for the 3 percent surge in the greenhouse gas in the last decade. Obama tightened rules on the industry. Will Trump repeal them? -
After years of negotiation with wildlife conservation groups, China's government has now set a timetable to end its legal ivory trade — March 2017. -
Scientists meeting in San Francisco issue their 2016 report card. "The Arctic as a whole is warming at least twice as fast as the rest of the planet," one says, and it is getting progressively worse. -
At a meeting in San Francisco, thousands of researchers are pondering how they can influence President-elect Donald Trump's thinking on climate change. -
A new study looks at clusters of tornadoes, like those that hit the Southeast this week. They are costly in lives and insurance payouts. -
New evidence suggests that for a lot of birds, plastic actually smells like food. The reason for that involves a common kind of algae floating in the ocean and a "chemical scream."
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During the campaign, the president-elect said climate change is not real, and he rejected last year's international agreement to cut greenhouse gases.
