by Amelia Williamson, Texas A&M University

COLLEGE STATION, Texas (February 8, 2008) - Ever since high school, Texas A&M University professor Barbara Gastel has had two loves – science and writing. When it came down to making a decision about her career, instead of choosing between the two, she combined them for a career in science communication.

Gastel now coordinates the master’s degree program in science and technology journalism at Texas A&M and teaches several science writing courses. She is also active in international work in scientific communication and is the editor of Science Editor magazine, the bi-monthly publication of the Council of Science Editors.

As an undergraduate biology and history of medicine major at Yale, Gastel wrote for and eventually assumed an editorial position at the university’s undergraduate science magazine. Torn between pursuing a career in science and one in communication after graduating from Yale, Gastel decided to attend medical school, thinking it would provide a good background for whichever career path she chose.

“Everyone said that once I went to medical school, I’d forget about all this writing stuff,” Gastel said. “But it turned out that in medical school too, it was the verbal end of things – explaining things to patients, making presentations, writing things up – that interested me the most and that I was probably the best at.”

While attending medical school at Johns Hopkins, Gastel became a student editor for the medical journal based at the university. “I enjoyed working for the journal so much, I decided that rather than having these two competing areas of interest in medicine and writing or editing, I’d put the two together for my career,” Gastel said.

After finishing medical school in 1978, Gastel pursued a fellowship at Newsweek, worked for the National Institutes of Health, taught science writing at MIT, was a visiting professor at Beijing Medical University, and became an assistant dean at the University of California-San Francisco School of Medicine. In 1989, she came to Texas A&M to help start up the science and technology journalism master’s program.

“When I heard about the position at Texas A&M, I remember going to the library to find information about the university,” Gastel said. “I still remember sitting at the microfiche reader where they had catalogs of universities, and the more I read about Texas A&M, the more I started realizing that it was a remarkable place.”

Gastel is now the coordinator for the science and technology journalism master’s program and does much of the teaching and mentoring for the program. She also developed an undergraduate biomedical writing course and teaches medical humanities courses at the medical school.

Gastel says the thing she enjoys most about her job is working with students. “Texas A&M has so many bright and motivated students, and it’s fun to see them learn and watch their careers develop over the years,” Gastel said. “That is the very greatest satisfaction.”

For the past 12 years, Gastel has also run the U.S. end of a program based in China to train editors at leading Asian medical schools and to teach Chinese biomedical scientists how to write scientific papers.

Although the program is now starting to wind down as activities are being taken over by the Asian side, Gastel is involved in a new international project called AuthorAID. This project is intended to help researchers in developing countries better understand how to publish papers in international scientific literature.

Gastel said she had always wanted to do international work and is glad she has had the opportunity to do so much work in China. “I certainly enjoy the Chinese culture, and it’s a place where I feel that my work makes a difference,” Gastel said. “There is a lot of good research being done in China, and it’s fun to help the researchers share that with the rest of the world.”