Scott Dance

Scott Dance is The Baltimore Sun's environment reporter. He specializes in stories that combine compelling narratives with environmental policy analysis, giving readers a greater understanding of the impacts of and adaptations to pollution and climate change. He was a 2020-2021 Abrams Nieman Fellowship in Local Investigative Journalism at Harvard University focused on how we are — and are not — responding to extreme weather and climate change.

Since joining The Sun in 2012, he has covered everything from the historic New Horizons flyby of Pluto to the arrival of Superstorm Sandy, and topics ranging from astronomy to geology to health. During the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, he focused on nursing homes, prompting Maryland to begin publicly reporting on outbreaks, and then uncovering inconsistencies in that data. He collaborated with The New York Times on reporting that revealed a wide racial disparity in nursing home coronavirus outbreaks.

He was part of the team named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for coverage of the death of Baltimore man Freddie Gray and riots that followed in 2015. And he played a supporting role in the local reporting Pulitzer the Sun’s staff received in 2020. He won second place for explanatory reporting in the Society of Environmental Journalists’ annual contest for his 2017 series, “Power struggle.”

He is a native of Timonium, Md., and a graduate of the University of Maryland, College Park, with a bachelor's degree in journalism and a master's degree in public policy.