Robert L. (Bob) Park is professor of physics and former chair of the Department of Physics at the University of Maryland. For twenty years, research into the properties of crystal surfaces occupied most of his waking hours, but in 1983 he was recruited by astrophysicist Willie Fowler (who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics later that year) to open a Washington Office of the American Physical Society. Bob initiated a weekly report of happenings in Washington that were important to science, and with the development of the internet, the weekly report evolved into the news/editorial column What's New. For the next twenty years he divided his time between the University and the Washington Office. In 2003 he returned to the University full time. With the support of the Department of Physics of the University of Maryland, he continues to write the occasionally controversial What's New, which has developed a following that extends beyond physics.

Dr. Park has also written two books based on his Washington experience:

Voodoo Science: The Road from foolishness to Fraud (Oxford, 2000)

Superstition: Belief in the Age of Science (Princeton, 2008).