Patchen Barss is a Toronto-based science journalist, author, and speaker. His upcoming biography, The Impossible Man: Roger Penrose and the Cost of Genius, will be published in November 2024. He was the 2021-2022 Sloan Biography Fellow at CUNY’s Graduate Center.
As a writer and editor Barss has contributed to Nautilus Magazine, Scientific American, the BBC, PBS, and The Walrus, as well as the National Post, Toronto Star, and Montreal Gazette. He has been a producer at CBC Television and the Discovery Channel, and is the former Head of Research and Development for the documentary film company CineNova. He spent seven years as the Director of Communications at the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research.
In 2018, OwlKids published Barss’s first book for children, Flow Spin Grow: Looking for Patterns in Nature. In 2010, he published The Erotic Engine: How Pornography Powered Mass Communications, from Gutenberg to Google (Random House).
Barss has worked with the consulting firm Lord Cultural Resources to develop major museums and exhibitions around the world, including the Perlan Museum of Icelandic Natural Wonders in Reykjavik and the University of Michigan Museum of Natural History in Ann Arbor. He has also worked extensively in the university sector, producing events, building media partnerships, training scientists in public speaking and writing, and developing strategic communications initiatives designed to provide the public with access to emerging ideas in science and the humanities.