Google “science news,” and you’ll get a mind-boggling 713 million Web pages, but the top spot belongs to Science News magazine, the weekly news source for science.

Tom Siegfried ’74 is particularly pleased by that. In December, he was named editor in chief of the venerable general science weekly magazine.

When Siegfried was hired, the publisher said he was a science writer and editor “with a world class reputation,” whose 20-year editorship raised The Dallas Morning News “to the top ranks of newspaper science departments.”

Now they hope Siegfried can steer the 87-year old Science News through its relaunch and redesign, maintaining reader confidence in the magazine’s reliability while stepping up its Web cred.

When the DMN retired their weekly science segment, Siegfried worked as a freelancer and completed his third book. In 2006, A Beautiful Math: John Nash, Game Theory, and the Modern Search for a Code of Nature was published by Joseph Henry Press.

Siegfried studied journalism, chemistry and history at TCU, then went on to University of Texas at Austin for a master’s degree in journalism with a physics minor. His print career began at the Fort Worth Press, where he wrote about business and science. He was on the journalism faculty at TCU before he landed at DMN, where he trained the science and medical reporters to specialize and mentored many young science writers during his tenure.

Siegfried’s DMN essays covered subjects as diverse as where the future comes from and how seagulls clean up nuclear waste. Archived on the Why Files, an online science site now maintained by the University of Wisconsin, the columns capture the scientific stories and sensations of the past two decades.

Read more at whyfiles.org/siegfried/