Sharon M. Friedman is a professor in the Department of Journalism and Communication and Director of the Science and Environmental Writing Program at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, USA. She was a member of the Three Mile Island Public’s Right to Information Task Force and served as a risk communication expert on several National Research Council committees concerned with radiation health effects at former nuclear weapons sites and with low-level radioactive waste. She chaired the US Department of Energy’s advisory committee for its Low Dose Radiation Research Program for three years. Friedman is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and of the Society of Risk Analysis. In 2009, she was one of five people worldwide to be awarded the International Green Pen Award by the Asia-Pacific Forum of Environmental Journalists for her contributions to developing environmental journalism in the region. She is the co-author of Reporting on the Environment: A Handbook for Journalists (UNEP, 1988), which has been translated into 19 languages, and the co-editor of two books, Communicating Uncertainty: Media Coverage of New and Controversial Science (Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1999) and Scientists and Journalists: Reporting Science as News (AAAS, 1988). Her research focuses on risk communication and on how scientific, environmental, and health issues are communicated to the public. She has conducted research on mass media coverage of the Three Mile Island and Chernobyl accidents, Alar, radon, dioxin, electromagnetic fields, and nanotechnology.
