Len Ackland

Len Ackland

Fellow: Awarded 2008
Field of Study: Science Writing

Competition: US & Canada

University of Colorado, Boulder

Len Ackland is an associate professor at the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Colorado at Boulder and is the founding director and current co-director of the university’s Center for Environmental Journalism.  Before joining the faculty in 1991, Mr. Ackland served seven years as editor of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, which under his direction won the National Magazine Award in 1987 for a special issue on the Chernobyl nuclear reactor accident the year before.  Previously he was a reporter at the Chicago Tribune, the Des Moines Register, and other publications.  Mr. Ackland began his journalism career as a freelance writer in Vietnam during 1968.

While at the Des Moines Register he won the George Polk Award in 1978 for local reporting.  He later received a Research & Writing grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation in 1990 that supported work on his book Making a Real Killing: Rocky Flats and the Nuclear West (University of New Mexico Press, 2nd ed., May 2002).  He holds a master’s degree from the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and a bachelor’s degree in history from the University of Colorado at Boulder.

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