Pat Duggins

News director for Alabama Public Radio

Pat Duggins is news director at Alabama Public Radio, an international award-winning journalist and a published author. He’s recognized globally for covering 103 NASA Space Shuttle missions, the Challenger and Columbia accidents and the construction of the International Space Station. Duggins spent 14 years covering NASA for NPR, and helped pioneer the network’s earliest use of the internet to deliver domestic news stories.

Within a year and a half of re-organizing the APR newsroom, Duggins and his team were generously honored with the national Edward R. Murrow Award for Overall Excellence alongside NBC-TV, CBS Radio and the AP. He and the APR news team have won 168 journalism awards under his leadership –one-third of which are at the national or international level. APR is also the first radio news operation to be honored with the John Seigenthaler Prize for Courage in Journalism from RFK Human Rights, in addition to the 50th annual Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award for Radio.

Duggins’ first book on NASA came out in 2007, and the second in 2010. His second book, “Trailblazing Mars,” came out in paperback in 2017.