I’m a staff writer for The Atlantic, where I cover science. I’m also a Story Collider senior producer and a senior editor at The Open Notebook. I used to be a science reporter for The New York Times; before that, I was briefly at Undark, Smithsonian, and NOVA; before that, I was a bacteriologist studying genes and proteins.
Nowadays, I mostly write about infectious disease, evolution, ecology, and weird flora, fauna, and microbes, especially those that have unusual numbers or types of mates, appendages, or orifices. I have an especially big soft spot for stories about cats.
In 2022, I won an Eric and Wendy Schmidt Award for Excellence in Science Communications. In 2021, I won a Science in Society journalism award. And in 2020, I won the Evert Clark/Seth Payne Award for Young Science Journalists. My writing has also been featured in the Best American Science and Nature Writing.
I have a spouse, two cats, and a Ph.D. in microbiology from Harvard University. Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me! once flatteringly and erroneously called me an epidemiologist. I am, in fact, not.