Wilson da Silva is an Australian science journalist and editor who has worked in magazines, newswires, newspapers, television and online. He is editor and co-founder of Cosmos, an Australian science magazine, and Cosmos Online, the magazines' science news website.
He has been an on-air science reporter and producer for Australian Broadcasting Corporation television, a staff journalist on The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald newspapers, a foreign correspondent for Reuters, science editor of ABC Online, a correspondent for London's New Scientist magazine, and served as managing editor of the science magazines Newton, 21C and Science Spectra. From 2006-09, he was the founding editor-in-chief of G Magazine, an environmental consumer lifestyle title that was the country's first carbon neutral magazine and produced on 100% recycled paper.
He is the creator of HELLO FROM EARTH, a web-based initiative to send messages from the public, each just 160 characters in length, to Gliese 581d, the nearest Earth-like planet outside the Solar System. Created as a science communication exercise for 2009 National Science Week in Australia, it collected nearly 26,000 messages that were beamed by NASA's Canberra Deep Space Communication Complex on 28 August 2009.
The winner of 31 awards, including Editor of the Year (twice - in 2006 and 2005, Australia's Bell Awards for Publishing Excellence), the 1997 Human Rights Award for Print Journalism and the 1996 Michael Daley Award for Science Journalism. He has also written and produced two prize-winning documentaries, including The Diplomat, the film that depicted Nobel Peace laureate José Ramos-Horta and his eventually successful struggle to win independence for East Timor. The film won da Silva and fellow producer Sally Browning the 2000 AFI Award for Best Documentary (Australian Film Institute).
A past president of the World Federation of Science Journalists, he is a former president of the Australian Science Communicators and of The Australian Museum Society, and has served on the board of the Australian Society of Authors. He is one of the founders of Science in the Pub, an innovative public communication initiative which was awarded the 2000 Eureka Prize for the Promotion of Science. In October 2009, da Silva created and hosted six Science in the Pub sessions for the Quantum to Cosmos festival at Perimeter Institute in Waterloo, Ontario, and also hosted two Quantum to Cosmos panels. In his opening panel, he asked nine physicists, "what keeps you awake at night?"
He makes frequent appearances on radio and television in Australia, including breakfast TV shows Sunrise and Today, and has spoken at many public lectures and conferences, among them the UNESCO World Science Forum, the EuroScience Open Forum and Japan's annual Science and Technology in Society Forum. He is scheduled to be among the first passengers of Virgin Galactic's space service when flights begin in 2012. Born in Brazil, he now lives in Sydney, Australia.
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