Professor Jim Detjen joined the Michigan State University (MSU) Journalism School faculty in January 1995 as the Knight Chair in Journalism, the nation's only endowed chair in environmental reporting. He is also the Director of MSU's Knight Center for Environmental Journalism and MSU's Environmental Journalism Program. He is a full professor with tenure. Prior to joining MSU's faculty, he spent 21 years as a professional newspaper reporter and editor. He covered local government, police, agriculture and the environment for The Poughkeepsie (N.Y.) Journal from 1973 to 1977. He covered environmental issues, worked as an investigative reporter and wrote editorials at The Courier-Journal in Louisville, Kentucky from 1978 to 1982. He covered scientific, environmental and medical issues and served as a part-time editor on the science, state, city, national and foreign desks of The Philadelphia Inquirer from 1982 to 1994. He has also worked as a part-time correspondent for The New York Times and his work has been published in The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, The Detroit Free Press, The Miami Herald, The Boston Globe and many other newspapers and magazines. He served as the host of "Earth View," a cable television program on environmental issues in 1992.

He has won more than 50 state, national and international awards for his reporting, including the George Polk Award, the National Headliner Award for investigative reporting, the Thomas Stokes Award for natural resources reporting (twice) and the Edward Meeman Award for environmental reporting (five times). His work has been nominated eight times for a Pulitzer Prize and he has been a finalist three times. In 1996 he received Columbia University's "distinguished achievement" award from its Graduate School of Journalism for his contributions to environmental journalism. In 1997 The Earth Times named Professor Detjen as one of the 100 most influential people on environmental and sustainable development issues in the world. In 1998 he was given the International Green Pen Award for his contributions to environmental journalism around the world.

He is the co-author of four books, "Who's Poisoning America" (Sierra Club Books), "Media and the Environment" (Island Press), "Environmental Risk Reporting" (Rutgers University Press) and "A Field Guide for Science Writers" (Oxford University Press). His research interests focus on environmental and science reporting, journalism ethics and journalism history.

He is the founding president of the U.S. Society of Environmental Journalists (SEJ) and since 1994 has served as the president of the International Federation of Environmental Journalists (IFEJ). He serves on the boards of directors of SEJ, IFEJ and the Council for the Advancement of Science Writing (CASW). He has a B.S. degree from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y. where he was the managing editor of his college newspaper and a M.S. degree with honors from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. He has done additional academic work at Harvard University (business and public administration), the University of Washington at Seattle (environmental science) and the University of Maryland at College Park (Knight Fellow in biotechnology).

He has also taught at Drexel University in Philadelphia and Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, N.Y. and he has lectured at Oxford, Yale, Columbia, Princeton, the University of Michigan, the University of Texas, the University of Tennessee and many other universities.