Peter Calamai CM (June 23, 1943 – January 22, 2019)[1] was an American-born Canadian science journalist.
Early life and education
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]
Personal life
Calamai was an avid fan of Sherlock Holmes and was heavily involved with The Bootmakers of Toronto[11] and The Baker Street Irregulars,[2] literary societies devoted to the fictional character.
His other interests included conchology (with a specialization in the cowry), ornithology, astronomy, the genetic engineering of tomatoes,[10] choir, tennis, and golf.[2]
He died on January 22, 2019, at his home in Stratford, Ontario, after a period of heart-related health problems.[1]
Awards
Calamai won three National Newspaper Awards: in the Long Feature (William Southam Award; formerly Feature Writing) category in 1981, and in the Breaking News (formerly Spot News Reporting) category in 1984 and 1985.[12]
He won a Michener Award in 1987 for public interest journalism for his work overseeing a massive investigation series on adult literacy in Canada.[3][9][13] The next year, then prime minister Brian Mulroney officially launched the National Literacy Secretariat, and one year after that, Statistics Canada launched the first of its national literacy surveys.[2]
In 2008, he was awarded the CAP-COMP Peter Kirkby Memorial Medal for Outstanding Service to Canadian Physics,[8] "for his exemplary communication of science to the public, for his dedication to the promotion of science through the media, and for his advocacy for science in Canada."[10] The same year, he also received the Award for Distinguished Science Journalism in the Atmospheric and Related Sciences from the American Meteorological Society, "[f]or a four-part series on Arctic atmospheric research that captures the complexity of the science and takes the reader on a descriptive journey to one of the remotest parts of the globe."[14]
In 2012, he received the Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal.[2]
In 2014, he was named as a Member of the Order of Canada, before being invested in 2016, "[f]or his achievements as a science journalist and for his contributions to the cause of literacy."[9]
He was inducted into the McMaster Alumni Gallery in 1982[5][15] and received an honorary Doctor of Science degree from the university in 2015.[4][8]