Far North Science is produced by Doug O’Harra, a writer and science journalist based in Anchorage, Alaska. The site aims to report the latest science developments about Alaska and Arctic science, and offer a portal to Far North news and research. We also plan to offer links for readers to publish their own tales of adventure from Alaska.
About Doug O’Harra
Since driving up the Alaska-Canada Highway in 1982 in a battered Volkswagen van, O’Harra has reported and written stories all over the state, from the North Slope tundra to the Southeast Alaska rain forest, from the Bering Sea to Prince William Sound.
O’Harra worked for the Anchorage Daily News off and on for more than two decades, spending 11 years as the staff writer for the paper’s former Sunday magazine, We Alaskans. As a Daily News staffer, O’Harra covered the gamut of topics, including five Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Races as well as police news, disasters, lifestyles, environment, urban wildlife and neighborhood issues. His newspaper work won dozens of state, regional and national press awards. Along the way, he earned a MA in English and a MFA in writing from the University of Montana.
Between 2000 and 2005, O’Harra covered Alaska science for the Daily News and wrote frequently about marine biology, marine mammals, climate warming, archaeology and wildlife management. One of his last published stories at the Daily News was a serial narrative about a fatal Coast Guard helicopter crash during the grounding of a soybean freighter in the Aleutian Islands. Drift to Disaster was a winner of the McClatchy Newspaper President’s Award for 2005. He also wrote about the travails of Big City Bears in what passes for surburbia in Alaska.
Stories by O’Harra have also appeared in Best American Newspaper Writing, Geo, Smithsonian. In 1995, three science stories won the small newspaper science writing award from the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In 2007, new work by O’Harra will appear in Alaska Magazine and in a Watchable Wildlife viewing guide for Alaska’s Kenai Peninsula.
O’Harra now lives in Anchorage on a city park sometimes visited by bears and coho salmon. When he’s not kayaking, cross-country skiing, camping, fishing or writing, he spends time with his wife and three children.
About the site design
Far North Science is powered by Wordpress. The site design and layout of Far North Science has been modified from the templates and code of the handsome Tiga Wordpress theme, copyright 2006 by www.shamsulazhar.com. Built into Far North Science are many Wordpress plugins. We’ve tuned the site with the help of countless support posts archived at Wordpress.
If this site functions and continues to grow, the Wordpress community deserves huge credit.