Peter Aldhous

Peter Aldhous is a science and data reporter based in San Francisco. He also teaches investigative reporting and data visualization in the Science Communication Program at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Peter got his start in journalism in 1989 as a reporter for Nature in London, fresh from a PhD in animal behavior. Later he worked as European correspondent for Science, news editor for New Scientist and chief news and features editor with Nature, before moving to California in 2005 to become New Scientist‘s San Francisco bureau chief.  From 2015 to 2022 he worked on the science desk at BuzzFeed News. Peter’s maps of U.S. government surveillance flights were named data visualization of the year in the Global Editors Network’s 2016 Data Journalism Awards; that project also won gold for data journalism and the overall Most Beautiful prize in the 2016 Kantar Information is Beautiful Awards. A follow-up project, which used machine learning to identify further covert spy planes, won the JSK Fellowships award for innovation in GEN’s 2018 Data Journalism Awards. He was a finalist in the Online category of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine 2019 Communication Awards for his data-driven coverage of wildfires.