Meredith Rizzo
Meredith Rizzo is a visuals editor and art director on NPR's Science desk. She produces multimedia stories that illuminate science topics through visual reporting, animation, illustration, photography and video. In her time on the Science desk, she's reported from Hong Kong during the early days of the pandemic, photographed the experiences of the first patient to receive an experimental CRISPR treatment for sickle cell disease and covered post-wildfire issues from Australia to California. In 2021, she worked with a team on NPR's Joy Generator, a randomized ideas machine for ways to tap into positive emotions following a year of life in the pandemic. In 2019, she photographed, reported and produced another interactive visual guide exploring how the shape and size of many common grocery store plastics affect their recyclability.
Her video work has included science explainer videos on the physics of bullets to how long you can be contagious with the flu, and an animated series on the science of invention. As an art director, she helped build NPR's network of freelance illustrators and animators, growing the community through NPR's Illustration Tumblr. She has also art directed for three seasons of the NPR podcast Invisibilia.
Rizzo holds a master's degree in New Media Photojournalism from Corcoran College of Art + Design and a bachelor's degree in photography from Wolverhampton University in the U.K. Prior to joining NPR in 2013, she photographed artifacts from the Library of Congress' collections, contributing to a public archive of more than 150,000 images over four years.
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How much damage a bullet does when fired at the human body hinges on physics.Our latest "Let's Talk" video shows and explains why certain types of ammunition cause greater havoc than others.
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In this episode of the Invisibilia podcast, our hosts explore how it feels to be "in between," including the story of one woman who spends so much time daydreaming that it interferes with her life.
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Ayanna Howard was 27 when she headed her first team at NASA. She talks about feeling like an outsider, and discovering that diversity drives innovation.
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Hahna Alexander initially invented a shoe that could charge a battery, but no one wanted to use it. "You have to invent something that people can't live without," she says.
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The blood thinner warfarin, which prevents blood clots, owes its existence to some cows who got very sick after eating spoiled hay — and to a chemist who spent years trying to figure out why.
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Nicole O'Hara was 29 when she had a double mastectomy after a cancer diagnosis. She chose to cover the scars with a tattoo that blooms like her garden, with apple blossoms, bluebells and heather.
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Children of people in the country illegally often experience fear and worry — with the shadow of deportation as a constant presence. How can they work through those emotions? One workshop uses comics.
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Years of treating grievously injured people starts to wear on a person, a trauma nurse in Minneapolis says. She explores "compassion fatigue" in a semi-autobiographical poem.
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After an incorrect dose of a chemotherapy drug for Crohn's disease caused Anne Webster's bone marrow to shut down, she decided that, if she survived, she'd write about her experience. -
The science community feels threatened under the current administration. Researchers, educators and activists took to the nation's capital to say that cuts to scientific funding affect us all.