Ken Chiacchia has too many pie plates in the air. A medical science writer and editor at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, he writes for a number of publications for the lay public and edits clinical newsletters for doctors in the region. (In case you're wondering, yes they've picked his brains for ideas about the ad campaign, but no he didn't write "Choose a hospital as if your life depended on it." But he wishes he had.) He's also had freelance pieces in the Harvard Health Letter, Living Healthy, and Walking. Ken winds up at Confluence this year partly because of a hobby of collecting form-letter rejections from SF editors. A member of Pittsburgh Worldwrights, he regards the published members' hundreds of pre-success rejections with a feeling of dread, as he's only up to about 50 now. Recently he began branching into straight news reporting, covering (appropriately enough) the Mars Area School District for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette's North Hills section. Ken is also a search-and-rescue dog handler and EMT with Allegheny Mountain Rescue Group, an all-volunteer Pittsburgh-area SAR team.

Ken began his odyssey toward science writing in the laboratory, taking an astounding *seven years* of graduate school to figure out he didn't want to be a biochemist after all. In 1990, with his PhD thesis still in the form of disjointed notes strewn about his apartment, he talked himself into a writing job at Harvard Medical School. He worked in Boston until 1993, when a new wife who wanted a house, the desire to escape Nightmare-Boss-from-Hell, and most of all a better job in Pittsburgh made the move from New England to the 'Burgh a pretty darned good idea.

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