"Why scientists are the greatest people in this Universe and all others."

ASN is proud to announce that the Writer for Science Times of The New York Times, Claudia Dreifus, will be the Guest Speaker at the closing banquet of the 35^th Annual Meeting, Wednesday, August 18, 2004 at Tavern on the Green Restaurant in New York City.

Claudia Dreifus is author of Scientific Conversations: Interviews on Science from The New York Times. As one of the preeminent interviewers of our time, Claudia Dreifus has crisscrossed the globe to interview an eclectic selection of the world's most powerful and interesting women and men, the people whose opinions will shape our future. Dreifus's interviews, by the subjects she chooses and the questions she asks, depict her own forceful vision of our times, as well as that of those she interviews. She has interviewed the Dalai Lama, Charles Brenner, Freeman Dyson, Stephen Straus, Henry Kissinger, Toni Morrison, Ted Turner, just to name a few.

"Claudia Dreifus is one of the world's great interviewers and a superb writer.... Being interviewed by Claudia Dreifus is like playing tennis with Steffi Graf: do your best, and you'll learn a lot; any thing less, and she'll pave the court with you." - Dan Rather

"Altogether, Dreifus's book Interview is a clinic in the interviewer craft [and] a treat for journalists everywhere who refuse to take no, or silence or evasion, for an answer." - Columbia Journalism Review

Claudia Dreifus has been a magazine journalist and political interviewer for almost all of her adult life. For ten years she was "LI Interviewer," producing two 3,000-word interviews a month for Newsday's Sunday Magazine. After Newsday, she went to Playboy, where she refined her skills interviewing such luminaries as Gabriel García-Márquez, William Safire, and then Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega. For several years a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine, Dreifus currently, in addition to being a contributing writer for the "Science Times" section of The New York Times, she is a contributing editor to the world’s largest magazine, AARP – The Magazine, and a contributor to Scientific American, SEED, and MS. Magazine. Claudia Dreifus is an adjunct professor at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs and Senior Fellow at the World Policy Institute of the New School for Social Research. She lives in New York City.