INTERNATIONAL GREEN PEN AWARD WINNER - 2009
Prof. Sharon M. Friedman - USA

Friedman has been a consultant to a number of government, industrial and non-profit organizations including the U.S. President's Commission on the Accident at Three Mile Island, ESCAP, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Electric Power Research Institute. She served on several committees of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences as a risk communication expert for radiation and low level radioactive waste issues. She also chaired the U.S. Department of Energy's Advisory Committee for its Low Dose Radiation Research Program.

Friedman is a member of the Governing Council of the Society of Risk Analysis where she chairs the Communications Committee.  A member of the editorial board of the journal, Science Communication, she also served as Vice-Chairperson of the Board of Trustees of the International Food Information Council Foundation for 13 years. She was Associate Editor of the journal Risk: Health, Safety & Environment from 1998-2005. She was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science for her contri¬butions toward furthering the public understanding of science and technology in 1989. She also was awarded an endowed Iacocca Professorship at Lehigh, which she held for eight years. In 1995, she was honored for her Asian environmen¬tal training activities by the International Center for Journalists of Washington, D.C.  In 1998, she was co-winner of the faculty-staff international scholar's award from the Lehigh University chapter of Phi Beta Delta, international honor society.  In 2006, she was a co-recipient of Lehigh's highest honor, the Hillman Faculty Award for excellence in research, teaching and service.

Reasons why the candidate merits the Award

Sharon Friedman, with Kenneth Friedman, helped Asian environmental journalists in their early efforts to develop the field of environmental journalism in southeast Asia, working with ESCAP, government officials, journalists and scientists to assess the state of environmental media coverage in Asia and then co-authoring the first edition of the book, Reporting on the Environment: A Handbook for Journalists. After the handbook was completed, she then donated her time over eight years to travel to the southeast Asian region and teach ten environmental journalism workshops as well as deliver four conference lectures in eight southeast Asian countries. She also reported on Asian environmental journalism activities to U.S. environmental journalists, scholars and scientists through articles she wrote that appeared in newsletters and magazines.

In addition, she worked closely with the leaders of the then-APFEJ to provide support about media and environmental educational activities and training opportunities that were available in the United States. Working with the then-Center for Environmental Journalists (now called in the International Center for Journalists) in Washington, DC, she helped develop and plan a three-week trip to the United States for 12 Asian environmental journalists selected by APFEJ in 1994. For one of those weeks, she hosted the journalists at Lehigh University for a series of seminars and workshops about environmental science and journalism issues. In addition, she hosted an Asian Foundation Fellow from Indonesia for a three-month visit to Lehigh University in 1995. He studied how environmental journalism was taught at several U.S. universities and used that knowledge to develop training workshops for Indonesian environmental journalists. 

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