Dione Rossiter is the director of the AAAS Mass Media Science and Engineering Fellows Program. The Fellowship places advanced science student in news outlets across the country to work as science reporters for 10 weeks during the summer. Her goals within this position are to: convince scientists of their duty to communicate the benefits of science outside of academia to the broader society; arm scientists with the skills to communicate science more effectively to each other, students, reporters, and lay audiences; encourage more, and more accurate, science coverage within the mass media; and present viable and fulfilling alternative science career options to young scientists.
She is also the manager of the AAAS Minority Science Writers Internship. The MSWI is a summer internship program for minority students interested in journalism as a career and who want to learn about science writing. Interns are placed at the Washington, D.C. headquarters of AAAS’s Science magazine, the largest interdisciplinary journal in the world.
She also organizes public outreach and engagement events, particular those aimed towards under-served communities, and promotes and encourages women and historically underrepresented minorites (of which she is both) in science. For example, she coordinates AAAS Public Science Day and the AAAS booth at the White House Easter Egg Roll.
Rossiter joined AAAS in 2012 after receiving her PhD in Atmospheric Science (cloud physics) within the Earth and Planetary Sciences Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz. While a graduate student, she worked with the Division of Graduate Studies to create university initiatives that would address the lack of diversity amongst the graduate population. Before her final year in graduate school, she was awarded an AAAS Mass Media Science and Engineering Fellowship and was placed at Voice of America in Washington, DC. Between graduate school and her undergraduate work at the University of California, Berkeley, she worked as an educator at the Lawrence Hall of Science in Berkeley, California.