Christopher Joyce
Christopher Joyce is a correspondent on the science desk at NPR. His stories can be heard on all of NPR's news programs, including NPR's Morning Edition, All Things Considered, and Weekend Edition.
Joyce seeks out stories in some of the world's most inaccessible places. He has reported from remote villages in the Amazon and Central American rainforests, Tibetan outposts in the mountains of western China, and the bottom of an abandoned copper mine in Michigan's Upper Peninsula. Over the course of his career, Joyce has written stories about volcanoes, hurricanes, human evolution, tagging giant blue-fin tuna, climate change, wars in Kosovo and Iraq, and the artificial insemination of an African elephant.
For several years, Joyce was an editor and correspondent for NPR's Radio Expeditions, a documentary program on natural history and disappearing cultures produced in collaboration with the National Geographic Society that was heard frequently on Morning Edition.
Joyce came to NPR in 1993 as a part-time editor while finishing a book about tropical rainforests and, as he says, "I just fell in love with radio." For two years, Joyce worked on NPR's national desk and was responsible for NPR's Western coverage. But his interest in science and technology soon launched him into parallel work on NPR's science desk.
In addition, Joyce has written two non-fiction books on scientific topics for the popular market: Witnesses from the Grave: The Stories Bones Tell (with co-author Eric Stover); and Earthly Goods: Medicine-Hunting in the Rainforest.
Before coming to NPR, Joyce worked for ten years as the U.S. correspondent and editor for the British weekly magazine New Scientist.
Joyce's stories on forensic investigations into the massacres in Kosovo and Bosnia were part of NPR's war coverage that won a 1999 Overseas Press Club award. He was part of the Radio Expeditions reporting and editing team that won the 2001 Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University journalism award and the 2001 Sigma Delta Chi award from the Society of Professional Journalists. Joyce won the 2001 American Association for the Advancement of Science excellence in journalism award as well as the 2016 Communication Award from the National Academies of Sciences.
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Plastic trash less than 5 millimeters long is in the things we eat and drink, and the air we breathe. Scientists are just beginning to study where it comes from and how it might affect our health. -
The engineer views a landfill as a living ecosystem, and the plastic that clogs it as a serious threat that crowds out life and never goes away. Can we eliminate the waste before it smothers us? -
Scientists have been analyzing bones first uncovered by a utility crew digging at the Manassas National Battlefield Park in Virginia. The remains provide insights into surgery during the Civil War. -
Biologists knew the sharks sometimes traveled from waters off Costa Rica south to the Galapagos Islands, but they'd never actually witnessed it. -
The two satellites, which are collectively called GRACE and will replace two retired probes, are one of the most important tools for understanding the effects of climate change. -
From bass to lobster, hundreds of species that live along U.S. coastlines are projected to migrate north over the next 80 years, making them harder to catch and manage. It's already happening. -
New research shows how scorching temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico led to massive rainfall when the storm hit last year. The findings also suggest global warming will make the problem worse. -
Plus-sized mama fish have a size advantage over their petite counterparts: They can produce more eggs, and those eggs produce larger fish. It's a reminder that protecting big fish matters. -
Global warming has so far seen a gradual rise in average temperatures. But that may change, with extreme variations. And poor countries could bear the brunt of it. -
Turning food waste into fertilizer is popular in parts of Europe and is catching on in the U.S. But tiny plastics are also making their way into that fertilizer — and into the food chain.
