Lyne Starling Trimble Public Event Series
Confessions of a Cosmic Affairs Correspondent
Dennis Overbye, retired cosmic affairs correspondent at the New York Times
Wednesday, November 4, 2026
5:45pm, Reception
6:30pm, Lecture and Q&A
American Center for Physics
555 12th Street NW, Suite 250
Washington, DC 20004
Dennis Overbye.
Earl Wilson / The New York Times.
Abstract
For his outstanding contributions to the public understanding of science, AIP has named Dennis Overbye the 2026 winner of its Andrew Gemant Award, which honors work in the cultural, artistic, or humanistic dimensions of physics. Overbye reported for decades on the spectacular breakthroughs and difficult growing pains of science as a journalist for the New York Times. At this Trimble event, he will offer a behind-the-scenes account of his 2013 article, “Chasing the Higgs,” covering CERN’s successful multi-billion-dollar effort to construct the Large Hadron Collider and detect the Higgs boson, the final missing piece of the Standard Model of particle physics. The story occupied the entirety of the paper’s weekly Science Times section on March 5, 2013 and was a finalist for the 2014 Pulitzer Prize in explanatory writing. After his talk, Overbye will engage in conversation with his longtime friend and AIP’s board chair, astronomer David Helfand, and then the floor will open for audience questions.
Speaker biography
Overbye was a science reporter and “cosmic affairs correspondent” for the New York Times from 1988 until his retirement in 2024. He was born in Seattle, Washington, and grew up on nearby Mercer Island, a small town in the middle of Lake Washington. After earning a bachelor’s degree in physics from MIT in 1966, he attended UCLA to study astronomy. While there, he enrolled in a fiction-writing workshop and began working on a novel. His first job was as an assistant typesetter for Sky and Telescope magazine, where he rose to become a writer and then editor. Later, he worked at Discover and Time magazines and in New York University’s Science and Environmental Reporting program before moving to the Times. In addition to his numerous articles, he has written two books, Lonely Hearts of the Cosmos: The Scientific Search for the Secret of the Universe (1991) and Einstein in Love: A Scientific Romance (2000).
Top image
Dennis Overbye at his desk in 2019 answering reader questions. Photo credit: Aidan Gardiner / The New York Times.