CASW is saddened to learn of the death of renowned and prolific science journalist Paul Raeburn, on April 18, 2024. Raeburn served as a CASW board member from the late 1980s until 2004, including a nine-year stint as CASW treasurer. He then took on direction of CASW’s annual New Horizons in Science program, serving for seven years as it was merged with the National Association of Science Writers’ yearly workshop program to create the annual ScienceWriters conference.
Raeburn wrote five books, including Do Fathers Matter? (2014). Among his various jobs in journalism, he was the science writer and then the science editor at Business Week and earlier held the same position and that of chief science correspondent at The Associated Press. He also was a media critic and then the chief media critic at the Knight Science Journalism Tracker, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Raeburn’s alma mater), for several years. In 2012, he won the American Chemical Society’s Grady-Stack Award for Interpreting Chemistry for the Public.
A past president of the National Association of Science Writers and recipient of NASW’s Science in Society Journalism Award, Paul will be remembered by our community for his wit, insightful analyses, and excellent medical and science journalism.
We also fondly remember his conviviality and musical talent after many a hard workday at science seminars and at Bar Harbor’s Press Week, a program of The Jackson Laboratory and Johns Hopkins University. During the evening hours of a week-long seminar in New Orleans, Paul ferried CASW folks to great jazz venues and raw bars, recalls former CASW President Joann Rodgers. And wherever he traveled, he never turned down a request for a guitar rendition of Don McLean’s “American Pie.” The CASW board and staff extend our sincere condolences to Paul’s wife, Elizabeth DeVita-Raeburn, children, and extended family.
Arrangements for a May 4 memorial service are being made by the Greenwich Village Funeral Home.
