Elliot Kirschner

Collaborator, Producer

Elliot Kirschner is a New York Times best-selling author and Emmy-award winning news and documentary producer with a passion for science filmmaking and education. He is committed to finding innovative ways to bring high-quality storytelling to new and diverse audiences, building engagement and understanding around the nature of science and awe of discovery. Elliot has produced many science feature-length films and documentary shorts, including Human Nature and The Most Unknown. He got his start producing at CBS News for 60 Minutes, Sunday Morning and the Evening News. His reporting included war zones, natural disasters, and investigative reports. His longtime collaboration with journalism icon Dan Rather includes the best-selling book What Unites Use. He publishes a newsletter called Through The Fog on Substack.

Publications

What Journalists and Scientists Have in Common

We live in age of great challenges where truth and facts are under siege. This is inflicting real damage on many segments of our society. We must take heed and take action. We must find ways to unite in service of truth. One of us is a scientist and two of us are journalists. We…

Storytelling in Science Film: Narrative Engagement Relates to Greater Knowledge, Interest, and Identification With Science

To explore narrative engagement’s impacts on science communication, we examine a representative sample of U.S. adults randomly assigned to watch one of the four short documentary science films. Our results indicate that narrative engagement—feeling connected to the story world and identifying with characters—predicts a wide range of outcomes relevant to engagement and learning: greater knowledge…

An Evolving Need for Trusted Information

As Robert Groves, Mary T. Bassett, Emily P. Backes, and Malvern Chiweshe describe in their article, the COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the value and importance of connecting social science to on-the-ground decisionmaking and solution-building processes, which require bridging societal sectors, academic fields, communities, and levels of governance. That the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine…