I am an associate dean in Georgetown's School of Continuing Studies (http://scs.georgetown.edu). I am in charge of the Bachelor of Arts in Liberal Studies program, in which working adults take courses at night and on weekends toward an interdisciplinary college degree.

I also have served as the interim dean for SCS's Masters of Professional Studies degree in journalism.

I have been a journalist for more than 20 years. Most recently, I worked for nine years as a senior editor and senior writer for The Chronicle of Higher Education (http://chronicle.com), a weekly trade newspaper in Washington, D.C., that covers all sorts of goings-on in academe.

I was one of the information technology reporters, and my particular assignment was to follow advanced-technology projects such as supercomputing.

Most of my career, in fact, has been spent in journalism about science, medicine, and technology. I have had enormous fun: I've been the U.S. correspondent for New Scientist, a British weekly science magazine, which dispatched me to the South Pole, among other interesting assignments; and a reporter for Space News, for which I trolled the halls of the Pentagon for news. I've walked through a nuclear reactor, seen gigantic lasers, watched the disassembly of nuclear weapons, played with DNA, witnessed a nighttime space shuttle launch, and interviewed Nobel Prize winners.

I've also published two books on computer technology, "Writing Your Dissertation with Microsoft Word" and "Finding an Online High School."

Besides being a working journalist, I also am (I hope!) a scholar of journalism. In 2002, I earned a doctorate in mass communication from the University of Maryland at College Park. My research examines the relationships between the media and the scientific establishment.

A book based on my dissertation, "Embargoed Science," was published in 2006 by the University of Illinois Press. (See http://insidehighered.com/views/2006/08/21/kiernan for an excerpt.)