Richard Martin

Award-winning science and technology journalist Richard Martin has been covering the energy landscape for nearly two decades. A contributing editor for Wired since 2001, he has written about energy, technology, and international affairs for Time, Fortune, The Atlantic, the Asian Wall Street Journal, and many other publications. He is the former technology producer for ABCNews.com (1997-2000), the technology editor for The Industry Standard (2000-2001), and editor-at-large for Information Week (2005-2008), and since 2011 he has been the editorial director for Pike Research, the leading clean energy research and analysis firm. His work was selected for Best Science Writing of 2004, and his honors include an “Excellence in Feature Writing" award, from the Society for Professional Journalists, for a Seattle Weekly investigative report on Boeing’s ties to China.

Martin’s writing on the future of energy has taken him around the world. In 1997 he spent three months in Aerbaijan and Kazakhstan, as one of the first Western journalists to report on the last great oil rush of the 20th century, the Caspian Sea oil boom. In Canada's northern Saskatchewan province, Martin descended 600 feet underground for a rare close-up of the world’s richest uranium mine. He has travelled across Alaska’s forbidding North Slope to report on new horizontal drilling techniques for extracting oil from under the permafrost near the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. And he spent weeks investigating the strange phenomenon of “super-rust” inside oil tankers, for a Wired feature. In early 2012, reprising a reporting trip he made in the late 1980s, he drove the Gulf Coast to report on America’s new petroleum export surge for a cover story for Fortune. Martin’s December, 2009 Wired story on thorium catalyzed the thorium power revival.

Educated at Yale and the University of Hong Kong, Richard Martin lives in Boulder, Colorado with his wife and son.