Photograph, Stephen Cherry

MARYLAND SEA GRANT HAS A NEW SCIENCE WRITER, DANIEL PENDICK. He will cover the breadth of Chesapeake Bay science as well as the education and community outreach efforts of Maryland Sea Grant Extension. He succeeds Daniel Strain, who left the position earlier in 2015. "What excites me most is the chance to report on the extraordinary effort to restore and manage the Chesapeake Bay on the ecosystem scale, with all its wonderfully messy social, economic, and political dimensions," Pendick says

A native of New York state, Pendick grew up clamming, fishing, beach combing, and snorkeling with his four brothers on Long Island Sound. He says writing about the Chesapeake Bay environment is a kind of homecoming for him. "Replace the oysters and crabs with clams and flounder, and you pretty much have my childhood dinner plate," he says.

Pendick studied literature and rhetoric at Binghamton University in New York. He completed a master's degree in the history of science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. To pay the bills, he also worked as a science writer for the university. That led to an internship at Science News magazine and then a series of opportunities to hone his craft at other science magazines, either as a staff writer and editor or freelance contributor. Among other topics, he's covered extreme weather, earthquakes, volcanoes, climate change, dinosaur evolution, neuroscience, and cosmology. Most recently, he served as chief writer and executive editor of Harvard Men's Health Watch.

Pendick also brings experience in graphic design, illustration, and digital media, which he hopes to put to good use — along with a passion for plain language and strong verbs — as a contributor to Maryland Sea Grant's many print and web publications, including Chesapeake Quarterly magazine and On the Bay blog.