Paula Apsell

Senior Executive Producer, NOVA and Director of the WGBH Science Unit

Paula S. Aspell got her start in broadcasting at WGBH Boston, where she was hired fresh out of Brandeis University to type the public broadcaster's daily television program logs--a job that Apsell notes is now, mercifully, automated. Within a year, she found her way to WGBH Radio, where she developed the award-winning children's drama series The Spider's Web, and later became a radio news producer. But her real interest lay in television and science. In 1975, she joined a fledgling WGBH-produced national series that would set the standard for science programming on television: NOVA.

Apsell produced a number of critically acclaimed NOVA episodes before joining Dr. Timothy Johnson at WCVB, the ABC affiliate in Boston, as senior producer for medical programming. In 1983, she spent a year studying at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as a Knight Fellow, then called the Vannevar Bush Fellowship in the Public Understanding of Science. She returned to WGBH in 1984 to become executive producer of NOVA, guiding the series into today's highly competitive, multi-media environment.

In addition to the programs in the regular NOVA television schedule, Apsell has overseen the production of many award-winning WGBH Science Unit specials including A Science Odyssey and Secrets of Lost Empires, Building Big with David Macauley, Evolution, a co-production with Vulcan Productions and Bioterror, a 2002 Emmy winner produced in association with The New York Times. NOVA's fall 2003 season included an ambitious three-hour miniseries based on the best seller The Elegant Universe by Columbia University Professor Brian Greene. She's also directed NOVA's diversification into other media, most notably NOVA's award-winning Web site and the NOVA/PBS Online Adventures. As executive in charge of NOVA's large format film unit, Apsell has overseen the production of To the Limit, Stormchasers, Island of the Sharks, Special Effects, the first IMAX film ever to be nominated for an Academy Award and Shackleton's Antarctic Adventure.

Today, NOVA is the most popular science series on American television and on the Web. In 1998, the National Science Board of the National Science Foundation awarded NOVA its first-ever Public Service Award. NOVA has won every major broadcasting award, including the Emmy, the Peabody, the AAAS Westinghouse Science Journalism Award, and the Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Gold Baton. Apsell has received numerous individual awards for her outstanding record of achievement, among them the 1994 Bradford Washburn Award from the Museum of Science, Boston, whose previous winners include Walter Cronkite and Jacques Cousteau; the 1996 Carl Sagan Award given by the Council of Scientific Society Presidents, and, in 1999, the American Physics Institute's Andrew Gemant Award.

Paula Apsell lives in Newton, Massachusetts with her husband and two daughters. She has served on the boards of several organizations, including The Earthwatch Institute, Hebrew College, Vanderbilt University's National Advisory Board for Science, Engineering and Technology Communictions, Brandeis University Board of Overseers, and the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History. She is a trustee of the International Documentary Association.

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