Chris Berdik

People: Chris Berdik

Senior Writer, Editorial

“It was the study IBM didn’t want anybody to see.” With that lead, Chris Berdik began a story for BU Today that untangled a complex legal web involving issues in technology, health, and labor—and a BU professor fighting to publish his research.

With a master’s in journalism from Stanford University, and years of experience writing for the Boston Globe, Mother Jones, and other publications, Berdik is an ace at cutting through dense topics and explaining them in layman’s English. And although his bachelor’s from Harvard University is in German and American history and literature, he has embraced science reporting, whether it’s on cancer or remote-control sharks.

“There’s a tremendous breadth of research that we can tap into here,” Berdik says, “and it’s a type of reporting that involves a lot of learning. That’s one thing I enjoy: really digging into a story—and that’s a requirement with a science story; otherwise you can’t present it properly.”

One of his favorites was about CAS biology professor Richard Primack’s climate-change research that used the collected observations of Henry David Thoreau and other naturalists in and around Concord, Mass., over the last 150 years. The BU Today story mixed text, audio, and a video slideshow.

“That was a lot of fun,” Berdik says. “It was a story that could have been done just as text, but as we thought about it, it showed itself to be really tailor-made for the kind of multimedia treatment we try to give more stories.”

In his rare spare time, Berdik enjoys “camping, and playing guitar really, really poorly.”