Andy Fraknoi

The Wonderfest Advisory Board and Prize Selection Committee is pleased to announce that Andrew Fraknoi has been selected to be the 2002 recipient of the Carl Sagan Prize for Science Popularization. 
Andrew Fraknoi is the Chair of the Astronomy Department at Foothill College and Educational Consultant for the Astronomical Society of the Pacific Before coming to Foothill in 1992, he served as the Society’s Executive Director for 14 years and was the editor of its popular-level astronomy magazine, Mercury.Fraknoi is author or coauthor of 14 books on astronomy and astronomy education, including The Planets and The Universe, two collections of astronomy and science fiction published by Bantam Books. He is the lead author of Voyages through the Universe, a major college-level textbook published by Harcourt College Publishing in 1996 and again in 2000, which has now become one of the leading astronomy texts in the U.S. He has also edited two collections of K-12 teaching resources, called “The Universe at Your Fingertips” and “More Universe at Your Fingertips”, published through the Astronomical Society of the Pacific. Radio listeners know him as a regular guest on local and national radio programs, explaining astronomical developments in everyday language. In Northern California, he appeared for over 20 years on the Jim Eason Show on KGO or KSFO radio and is now a regular guest on both the Pete Wilson Show on KGO and Michael Krasny’s Forum Program on KQED. Nationally, he has been heard regularly on Science Friday and Weekend All Things Considered on National Public Radio.He has given over 400 public lectures on topics ranging from the death of stars to the origin of the universe. Fraknoi serves on the Board of Directors of the Search for Extraterresrial Intelligence Institute, which administers Project Phoenix, a scientific program to identify possible radio signals from civilizations around other stars. He is also a Fellow of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP), specializing in debunking astrology. Fraknoi has a strong interest in helping to improve the way science is taught in the nations’s schools. For 20 summers he has organized and led the Universe in the Classroom workshops on teaching astronomy ingrades 3-12 through universities from Boston to Hawaii. He is the director of Project ASTRO, a program to bring volunteer astronomers into 4th through 9th grade classrooms on an ongoing basis, that now operates in 11 regional sites around the country.He was educated at Harvard and the University of California at Berkeley, and has taught astronomy and physics at San Francisco State University, City College of San Francisco, Canada College, and the College of San Mateo, as well as the University of California Extension Division.In 1994, he received the Annenberg Foundation Prize of the American Astronomical Society (the highest honor in the field of astronomy education) and the Klumpke-Roberts Prize of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific (given for a lifetime of contributions to popularizing astronomy.) Find out more about Andy Fraknoi…