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Steven H. (Haywood) Yaskell

| image = | image_size = | birth_date = (1957-07-09) July 9, 1957 | birth_place = Salem, Massachusetts , USA | nationality = American | fields = Linguistics,History of science }}

Yaskell co-authored The Maunder Minimum and the Variable Sun–Earth Connection with Willie Soon. The book treats historical and proxy records of climate change coinciding with the Maunder Minimum, a period from 1645 to about 1715 when sunspots became exceedingly rare.

Early life and education

Steven H. Yaskell was born in Salem, Massachusetts, United States of America, in 1957. His middle name, Haywood, was after Dr. Ralph Haywood, a respected Salem, Massachusetts pediatric physician, so named as he was the last child Dr. Haywood ever delivered. His father was a leather tanner and mother, a waitress who became a civil servant. The last of four children, Yaskell nearly died from lobar pneumonia at aged two and developed worsened allergic asthma as a consequence, the latter condition having been genetically inherited. Yaskell attended Keefe School (now defunct) in Peabody, Massachusetts, where he grew up, Seglitz Junior High School and King Street Junior High School (all defunct) in the same city, and graduated from Peabody Veteran's Memorial High School in 1975. He won science fairs in grade four (first place) and in grade seven (third place) in physical and biological science projects, respectively. He was his high school's newspaper editor as well as science editor. He attended Salem State University, then called Salem State College, from 1976 to 1978, studying speech pathology and biological sciences, dropping out to join the United States Marine Corps for continued financial support in completing studies after his service term. He subsequently completed a Bachelor of Arts, Honours, degree in 1987 at Carleton University in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada in English and Russian (dual majors) with dual minors in political science and biological science. This qualified him not only as a writer and editor, but also as a technical linguist, which lead in time to science authoring with a focus on science history.

Career

His first professional position was as a proofreader for the publications department at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute SIPRI in Stockholm, Sweden, mainly for the prestigious SIPRI Yearbook. He also copyedited researchers' book titles in the fields of environmental effects of war and nuclear, chemical and biological warfare. He was passed over for a permanent position as an editor due in part to a rare congenital eye condition, Keraconis, discovered by the Marine Corps in a discharge physical. While at SIPRI he also helped develop their online peace research database. He subsequently became a technical writer, then a research technical linguist, at Ericsson corporation, world specialists in telephony science. Later working for Ericsson business units, he helped develop online pre-sales technical information databases for Ericsson Radio Systems (now defunct) which platformed Ericsson's very successful mobile telephony subsystem, liaising with the Swedish Royal Institute of Technology KTH to help develop the then-nascent field of information engineering. He began pro bono work as an unpaid research assistant for the Smithsonian Institution at Harvard University by assisting Dr. Willie Soon in researching and writing several projects on natural climate change as driven by solar activity in 1997. The association ended in 2003.