Richard Harris

Credit Doby Photography / NPR

Award-winning journalist Richard Harris reports on science issues for NPR's newsmagazines Morning Edition, All Things Considered, and Weekend Edition.

Harris, who joined NPR in 1986, has traveled to the ends of the earth for NPR. His reports have originated from Timbuktu, the South Pole, the Galapagos Islands, Beijing during the SARS epidemic, the center of Greenland, the Amazon rain forest and the foot of Mt. Kilimanjaro (for a story about tuberculosis).

In 2010, Harris' reporting uncovered that the blown-out BP oil well in the Gulf of Mexico was spewing out far more oil than asserted in the official estimates. He covered the United Nations climate negotiations, starting with the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, followed by Kyoto in 1997 and Copenhagen in 2009. Harris was a major contributor to NPR's award-winning 2007-2008 "Climate Connections" series.

Over the course of his career, Harris has been the recipient of many of the journalism and science industries' most prestigious awards. The University of California at Santa Cruz awarded Harris the 2010-11 Alumni Achievement Award – the school's highest honor. In 2002, Harris was elected an honorary member of Sigma Xi, the scientific research society. Harris shared a 1995 Peabody Award for investigative reporting on NPR about the tobacco industry.

As part of the team that collaborated on NPR's 1989 series "AIDS in Black America," Harris was awarded a Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Silver Baton, a first place award from the National Association of Black Journalists and an Ohio State Award. In 1988, Harris won the American Association for the Advancement of Science Journalism Award for his report, "Anti-Noise: Can Technology Turn Noise into Quiet?" which explored a revolutionary technology that uses computer-generated noise to cancel out, not just mask, unwanted noise.

Before joining NPR, Harris was a science writer for the San Francisco Examiner. From 1981 to 1983, Harris was a staff writer at The Tri-Valley Herald in Livermore, California, covering science, technology, and health issues. Under the auspices of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Harris spent the summer of 1980 as a Mass Media Science Fellow reporting on science issues for The Washington Star, in Washington, D.C.

Harris is co-founder of the Washington, D.C., Area Science Writers Association, as well as past president of the National Association of Science Writers.

A California native, Harris was valedictorian of his college graduating class at the University of California at Santa Cruz in 1980. He earned a bachelor's degree in biology, with highest honors.

How To Clean Up Fish Farms And Raise More Seafood At The Same Time

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Credit Richard Harris / NPR

Thierry Chopin from the University of New Brunswick examines a raft that holds strings of seaweed. The seaweed grows around pens of farmed salmon and soaks up some of the nutrients that would otherwise pollute the Bay of Fundy.

Credit Richard Harris / NPR

Mussels thrive on particles that come from fish waste. The mussels help clear the water and reduce the environmental impact of fish farms. Canada's federal food agency has certified them as safe for human consumption.

Credit Richard Harris / NPR

Thierry Chopin examines two type of seaweed being grown around Cooke Aquaculture's salmon farm. The company sells the seaweed as a specialty food and to a cosmetic company, which extracts natural compounds from it. Chopin is also experimenting with seaweed as a protein supplement for fish meal.

Credit Richard Harris / NPR

Lenny Totten of Cooke Aquaculture examines a circular raft that holds up hundreds of heavy strings of mussels, which are cultivated for human consumption.

By Richard Harris

Originally published on Mon June 10, 2013 5:38 pm

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Last month, we told you about companies that are growing salmon on dry land. That's an effective — but expensive — way to reduce water pollution caused by fish farms. After all, marine aquaculture provides about half of the seafood we eat.

1:18 pm

Fri May 31, 2013

Gizmo Uses Lung Cells To Sniff Out Health Hazards In Urban Air

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Credit Adam Cole / NPR

Credit Richard Harris / NPR

Harvey Jeffries, a professor emeritus at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, shows off a greenhouse on campus that can simulate the atmosphere of any location on Earth.

Credit Richard Harris / NPR

This device uses lung cells to check the air for smog components that hurt human health.

By Richard Harris

Originally published on Fri May 31, 2013 9:23 pm

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Cities like Houston are dotted with air-sniffing monitors that measure levels of benzene and other potentially unhealthy air pollutants. But those monitors can't answer the question we care about most: Is the air safe?

That's because there's no simple relationship between toxic air pollutants and health risks. Researchers at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill are trying to get a leg up on that problem. They are building an instrument that uses human lung cells to measure health hazards in the air more directly.

3:01 am

Thu May 30, 2013

Breathing Easier: How Houston Is Working To Clean Up Its Air

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Credit Richard Harris / NPR

The Houston Ship Channel is home to a wide range of heavy industry, including chemical processing plants and petrochemical refineries.

Credit Richard Harris / NPR

Matthew Tejada stands near an air monitoring station.

Credit Richard Harris / NPR

A collage of photos from the Houston Ship Channel. It is home to a wide range of heavy industry, including chemical processing plants and petrochemical refineries.

Credit Houston Clean Air Network

This image, from the Houston Clean Air Network Ozone Viewer, shows readings taken on Jan. 21, 2013, at 3:15 p.m., on a particularly bad air day in the region. At the Houston Clean Air Network's site, you can watch the plume grow and spread over the city over the course of several hours.

Credit Richard Harris / NPR

Jason Harris, with the Texas Commission for Environmental Quality, uses an infrared camera to find leaks at a chemical facility near the Houston Ship Channel. The specialty cameras cost around $100,000.

Credit Richard Harris / NPR

By Richard Harris

Originally published on Fri May 31, 2013 12:18 pm

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The Houston area produces about a quarter of the nation's gasoline, and about a third of the plastics that are in our cars, cupboards and just about everywhere else. So it is no surprise that this heavily industrial area has a problem with air pollution. But in the past decade, Houston's air has improved dramatically.

How that happened is a tale of good science, new technology and a Texas law that prompted companies along the Houston Ship Channel to disclose their emissions.

5:18 am

Sat May 18, 2013

Not Your Grandpa's RV: This Roving Lab Tracks Air Pollution

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Credit Richard Harris / NPR

Ira Leifer, next to an RV he has outfitted with methane sensors and other equipment to sniff the air.

Credit Courtesy of Ira Leifer and Paige Farrell, et. al. / Published in Atmospheric Environment

This map shows methane measurements Ira Leifer took as he drove in his RV around the Los Angeles basin. Notice the pronounced spike in levels of methane around the La Brea Tar Pits in the center of the image. Geological faults here allow "natural" methane to escape. The redder the color, the more methane was detected.

Credit Richard Harris / NPR

Ira Leifer, at his garage-turned-lab in Santa Barbara, has been studying the levels of methane in the atmosphere.

Credit Richard Harris / NPR

Leifer stands atop his roving chemistry lab. He and his team took 6,600 methane readings on the cross-country drive from Florida to California.

By Richard Harris

Originally published on Sat May 18, 2013 1:45 pm

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If you're driving down the road someday and you come across a camper with a 50-foot periscope sticking up into the sky, you just might have crossed paths with Ira Leifer. His quirky vehicle is on a serious mission. It's sniffing the air for methane, a gas that contributes to global warming.

Leifer is an atmospheric scientist at the University of California, Santa Barbara. But you'll more often find him off campus, in a garage, next to a string of auto body shops near the airport.

1:06 pm

Wed May 15, 2013

Go Fish (Somewhere Else): Warming Oceans Are Altering Catches

Credit Melissa Farlow / National Geographic/Getty Images

Crew members unload a catch of sockeye salmon at Craig, Alaska, in 2005. Researchers say fish are being found in new areas because of changing ocean temperatures.

By Richard Harris

Originally published on Wed May 15, 2013 7:39 pm

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Climate change is gradually altering the fish that end up on ice in seafood counters around the world, according to a new study.

"The composition of the [global] fish catch includes more and more fish from the warmer areas, and cold-water fish are getting more rare, because the temperatures are increasing," says Daniel Pauly at the University of British Columbia, a co-author of the study.

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