About the team

  • Bari Scott – Executive Director

    Bari Scott provides creative oversight and coordination for SoundVision programs and week-long Science Literacy Workshops for journalists, and directs BURN and The Really Big Questions. Scott has won numerous awards, including the duPont-Columbia Silver Baton, AAAS “Pinnacle of Excellence” and two Peabody awards, and received a 2000-2001 Knight Science Journalism Fellowship at MIT. She sits on the board of directors of many local and national foundations and organizations and is a certified emergency volunteer instructor with the Oakland Fire Department.

  • Dean Olsher – Host and Senior Correspondent

    Dean Olsher is a writer, broadcaster, and composer. After years as NPR News’s culture correspondent in Washington, DC, he went on to create and host The Next Big Thing, which was distributed nationally by PRI. During an appointment as a visiting professor at NYU’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute, he created a popular course called The Medium Formerly Known as Radio. His book From Square One: A Meditation, with Digressions, on Crosswords (Scribner) claims to be about puzzles but is really about human psychology. And music.

  • Mary Beth Kirchner – Managing Producer

    Mary Beth Kirchner is a veteran producer and national program developer. Kirchner started her own production company in 1993 after serving as National Programming Director at WETA, Washington, DC. Prior to that, she was Executive Producer at the Smithsonian Institution’s Office of Telecommunications. Working for more than two decades in public radio she has collaborated with National Public Radio, Public Radio International, American Public Media, the Wolf Trap Foundation for the Performing Arts, Carnegie Hall, the BBC, the Dana Alliance for Brain Initiatives, the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, the Asia Society, NHK (Japan) and ABC News “Nightline,” among many others. She is the recipient of more than fifty national awards for her documentaries, music series, radio dramas and feature stories including a 2011 Peabody medal.

  • Robin Wise – Technical Director

    Robin Wise is an audio engineer and sound recorder based in Portland, Oregon who works on radio documentaries, audio books, documentary films and digital presentations. Robin’s studio, Sound Imagery, is all about bringing stories to life with sound. Among Robin’s many radio documentary series are The Promised Land, the DNA Files, Hearing Voices, and The Really Big Questions. Robin also works with independent producers on projects in radio, video and DVD authoring. Her numerous awards include: Two Peabody Awards, The Robert Wood Johnson Award, and an Alfred I. duPont-Columbia Silver Baton.

  • Chris Julin – Digital Producer

    Chris Julin has worked as a reporter, producer and editor at Minnesota Public Radio and KUOW, the NPR affiliate in Seattle. He’s been a community radio program director and news director and a television photographer. Projects Chris has produced and worked on have won numerous awards, including an Edward R. Murrow and a Peabody. Recently, he’s been an independent producer and taught journalism at the University of Minnesota Duluth.

  • flora lichtman

    Flora Lichtman – Producer

    Flora Lichtman is a science journalist living in New York. Her videos have appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic and in a number of film festivals. Previously, Flora worked for NPR’s Science Friday. Over the course of eight years with the program, she shot, produced and edited hundreds of science videos, chatted about them on the air, and hosted the 2-hour live radio show when Ira couldn’t make it. Her writing has appeared Popular Science and The New York Times, and she is co-author of “Annoying: The Science of What Bugs Us” — sadly a topic of deep personal interest.

  • emily haavik

    Emily Haavik – Web Writer/Production Assistant

    Emily Haavik is a television news producer and a freelance journalist. She has written for the Duluth News Tribune, the Lake County News Chronicle, Essentia Health, Journalism Practice, the news website Perfect Duluth Day and Duluth’s Homegrown Music Festival. She previously worked as an advertising copywriter at Swim Creative. She is a graduate of the University of Minnesota Duluth, where she received awards for her coverage of breaking news and for investigative journalism from the Minnesota Newspaper Association’s Better Newspaper Contest and the Associated Collegiate Press Best of the Midwest Awards.