Lyne Starling Trimble Public Event Series
Cosmic Affairs: A Career in Science Journalism
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.
Speaker biography
Dennis Overbye was a science reporter and “cosmic affairs correspondent” for the New York Times from 1988 until his retirement in 2024, and he is the 2026 winner of AIP’s Andrew Gemant Award, which honors contributions to the cultural, artistic, or humanistic dimension of physics. Overbye was born in Seattle, Washington, and grew up on 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 an editor. Later, he worked at Discover and Time magazines and in New York University’s Science and Environmental Reporting program before his move to the Times. Overbye’s 2013 story “Chasing the Higgs Boson,” detailing the long search for the elusive particle, was selected as a finalist for the 2014 Pulitzer Prize in explanatory writing. He has also 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.