The Vineyard Gazette has named Joel Greenberg as managing editor, the newspaper’s publisher Jane Seagrave announced this week.

Mr. Greenberg comes to the Gazette after 20 years at The Los Angeles Times, where he served as science and medicine editor. For the last two years he has worked as a writer in the media relations office of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.

He joins a newly configured editorial team that includes Vanessa Czarnecki, the former editor of Martha’s Vineyard Patch, who was appointed news editor in October. Ms. Czarnecki’s responsibilities will include managing the Gazette’s Web site. Gazette assistant editor Bill Eville has been named arts and features editor for the newspaper. Editor Julia Wells will continue to lead the newsroom, and Stephen Durkee will continue as director of graphics and design.

Prior to working at the LA Times, Mr. Greenberg was editor in chief of Science News Magazine in Washington, D.C. He has also been a science writer for The New York Times and The Miami Herald and a reporter for the Hartford Courant.

While at the LA Times, he was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize for coverage of the 1994 Northridge, Ca., earthquake. During his term as editor in chief, Science News won the George Polk Award for Science Writing.

He also was a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow (now the Knight Fellowship) at Stanford University, where he met his wife, Pamela Warrick, who was also in the fellowship program. The two subsequently were married at the Mayhew Chapel on the Vineyard and have been regular visitors to the Island for the last 30 years. They have two grown children, a daughter who is a dancer and a son who is a musician.