Stories by Daniel Vergano

Daniel Vergano is a senior opinion editor at Scientific American since 2023. He was previously a science reporter and editor at Grid News, BuzzFeed News, National Geographic and USA Today (where he was a science reporter for 14 years). He wrote a weekly science column, “Science Snapshots,” for USA Today for seven years, and has written freelance reports for the Washington Post, Men’s Health, Science, New Scientist, Science News, Air & Space Smithsonian, and others.

Starting in the 1990s, Vergano has become best known for pioneering new approaches to investigative science journalism, in reporting ranging from State Department cover-ups of Havana syndrome findings to the peer reviews of the “arsenic life” fiasco to the botched HHS investigation of the CDC’s failed coronavirus test. He was a leading national reporter in coverage of climate change in the 2000s, the overdose crisis in the 2010s and coronavirus vaccines in the early years of the COVID pandemic. He broke the news that space shuttles had suffered excessive heating because of foam strikes before the Columbia disaster in 2003 and published a feature report on the suspected anthrax killer in 2004, a year before the FBI identified the suspect.

Vergano is chair of the New Horizons committee for the Council for the Advancement of Science Writing and a journalism award judge for both the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the U.S. National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine. He taught journalism as an adjunct professor for New York University from 2012 to 2014 and was a 2007–08 Nieman Fellow at Harvard University, where he studied the intersection of politics and science. He has won the 2011 Gene S. Stuart Award by the Society for American Archeology and the 2006 David Perlman Award for Deadline Science journalism by the American Geophysical Union, and was a finalist for the 2001 Missouri Lifestyle Journalism award.

Vergano has a B.S. in aerospace engineering from Pennsylvania State University and an M.A. in science, technology and public policy from George Washington University. He worked as a space policy analyst for a federal-funded research and development center prior to starting his reporting career.