Brian Vastag

Before becoming associate news editor at JAMA in 2000, Brian Vastag worked as a press officer for the National Cancer Institute and Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions. During his four years at JAMA in Washington, DC, Mr. Vastag wrote countless news briefs and some 100 feature articles, including profiles of top scientists and examinations of the social impact of biomedical advances. He covered extensively the National Institutes of Health and Capitol Hill. As a freelance science journalist, Mr. Vastag specializes in addiction, brain sciences, cancer, and genetics, but covers the entire breadth of biomedical research. He began his career writing about space science, anthropology, evolutionary biology, sociology, and psychology. Mr. Vastag's training includes 18 months of graduate coursework in science and technology journalism at Texas A&M University, graduate courses in genomics and bioinformatics at George Washington University, and countless hours listening to some of the smartest people on earth.