Joe Palca is an American correspondent for National Public Radio.

[1][2] He then received a PhD in psychology from the University of California at Santa Cruz, where he researched human sleep physiology.

[3] Palca began his career in journalism in 1982 at the CBS affiliate in Washington, D.C.

He left television in 1986 to become a print journalist; he was both a Washington news editor at Nature and a senior correspondent for Science.

[4] He took a sabbatical from NPR in late 1999 for a year to study human clinical trials as a Kaiser Family Foundation Media Fellow.