Environmental Fridays Features NBC Journalist

Denise Chow

NBC News environment and science reporter Denise Chow will be the guest speaker for the Berrien RESA Math Science Center’s Grade 10 Chemistry class this coming Friday, Feb. 19, at 8 a.m. She said, "I plan to do a very brief overview of what I do on a daily basis and then go through some stories that I’ve written and the lessons learned from reporting them out. I will also fold in some lessons from covering the pandemic that are applicable for environmental journalism."

Since January 2020, Chow has been covering all aspects of the coronavirus pandemic, ranging from research to policy to vaccine distribution. Her work has been featured across the NBC network, and in 2019, she traveled to Greenland as part of a climate change special that aired on Nightly News and the TODAY Show. Before joining NBC, she worked as a radio producer for NPR and spent several years as a space reporter, covering astronomy, rocket launches and NASA's final space shuttle missions for SPACE.com. Chow was born and raised in Vancouver, Canada, but now lives in New York City. She attended the University of Toronto for her undergraduate studies, majoring in political science and criminology. She holds a master's degree in journalism from New York University.

Her talk is the fifth lecture in the 2021 spring semester Environmental Fridays Guest Lecture Series that is part of the Berrien RESA Grade 10 Chemistry course. The series was designed by Andrews University associate professor of chemistry Desmond Hartwell Murray to teach students how chemistry is involved in their environment and how it is real and relevant in their own lives. Murray said, "Chemistry is more than just memorizing the Periodic Table of elements or learning formulas or balancing equations; rather it is an essential part of our lived material experiences day in and day out. Students are challenged to connect textbook chemistry to the real world and to think scientifically and critically about the world around them in terms of chemical content and principles."

The series is also designed to give Murray’s students an opportunity to select a topic of interest to create a public science announcement (PSA) video as part of their class requirement. They will all then compete in the BEST Early Berrien RESA PSA competition held in April at the annual Michigan High School Math & Science Symposium on the campus of Andrews University. PSAs from previous years can be found at bestearly.com/psa. The BEST Early Berrien RESA PSA competition is open to all high school students.

The series is co-sponsored by the Berrien RESA Math Science Center, Andrews University Department of Chemistry & Biochemistry, the State of Michigan's Office of the Clean Water Public Advocate, Benton Spirit Community Newspaper and BEST Early. Topics have included water quality, air pollution, indoor pollution, brownfields, environmental careers, history of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the impact of agriculture on the environment, nuclear power, and climate change. Guest speakers have come from local environmental agencies, local and regional universities, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the Centers for Disease Control.

These lectures are free and open to all including high school and college students and everyone in the general public. They can be viewed on Zoom with meeting ID 949 4079 7468. All the lectures are recorded and can be found on YouTube.