BILL ALLEN served 25 years as a journalist before joining the University of Missouri faculty in 2004. A specialist in science, environment and medical reporting, he holds a joint appointment in the Missouri School of Journalism and the Science and Agricultural Journalism Program of the MU College of Agriculture, Food and Natural Resources. Allen was senior investigative reporter/medical at the Louisville Courier-Journal in 2003-04 and a science, environment and medical reporter at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch from 1989-2002. He began his journalism career at the City News Bureau of Chicago in 1977, and has worked at United Press International, the Institutes for Journalism & Natural Resources, Argonne National Laboratory and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he also taught science writing. Allen has freelanced articles for the Washington Post, New Scientist, BioScience and other magazines. He is author of Green Phoenix: Restoring the Tropical Forests of Guanacaste, Costa Rica (Oxford University Press, 2001).

Allen was a 1996-97 Knight Science Journalism Fellow at MIT, a 2000 Ford Environmental Journalism Fellow in Nicaragua for the International Center for Journalists, and a 2002 Environmental Journalism Fellow at the National Tropical Botanical Garden, Kauai. Among other honors, he won the 1999 Media Spotlight Award of Amnesty International-USA and the 1998 national Engineering Journalism Award. He was a finalist for the 1998 Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting, given by the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.

He earned a bachelor of science degree in biology and rhetoric as well as master’s degrees in journalism from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and history from the University of Illinois at Chicago.