Peter Calamai
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Peter Calamai CM (June 23, 1943 – January 22, 2019)[1] was an American-born Canadian science journalist.
Calamai was born in Berwick, Pennsylvania, the son of engineer Enrico Calamai and Jean Kennedy, and older brother to Michael and Paul.[2] He moved to Brantford, Ontario as a child.[3] He earned a Bachelor of Science in physics from McMaster University in 1965.[1] While at McMaster, he was editor-in-chief of the student newspaper, The Silhouette,[4] which won several national awards under his leadership.[2][5]
Career
As a journalist, Calamai started as a local reporter at the Brantford Expositor, then The Hamilton Spectator.[1] He joined Southam News in the early 1970s[3] as a parliamentary specialist and foreign correspondent in London, Nairobi, and Washington, before joining the Ottawa Citizen as an editorial pages editor in 1990.[1] In 1996, Conrad Black bought the Citizen's parent company, Southam, and shortly thereafter fired Calamai and his colleague, Jim Travers.[2]
From 1998 to 2008, Calamai was the chief science editor at the Toronto Star.[1] While at the Star, he was the first science reporter invited aboard the CCGS Amundsen, where he championed the importance of observing Earth Hour[6][7] and wrote a series debunking the claims of climate change deniers.[2]
As an academic, he was a Southam Fellow at Massey College in 1982–83, the Max Bell chair at the University of Regina School of Journalism in 1985–86, and a visiting associate professor in 1997–98 and adjunct research professor since 2001[8] at the Carleton University School of Journalism and Communication, teaching as a sessional instructor and supervising numerous theses.[3]
He was a founding member of the Canadian Science Writers' Association, founding director of the Science Media Centre of Canada,[9] Fellow of the Canadian Association of Physicists, and Fellow of the Institute for Science, Society and Policy at the University of Ottawa.[8] He also served as a member of advisory boards to Environment Canada, NSERC, and the Canadian Language and Literacy Research Network.[10]