finding resilience in uncertain times | climate, food, energy, safety, money

I’m a 2004 graduate of the Science Writing program at the University of California in Santa Cruz, and once I’d paid my dues with several internships, I’ve been living the peripatetic freelance lifestyle.

“So, do you make a living at that?” I was asked by Noam Chomsky—the MIT linguist and political gadfly—in one of my few brushes with fame. I’m happy to report that, yes, my writing does keep food on the table.

Winning a Middlebury Fellowship in Environmental Journalism, which ran from mid-2008 to mid-2009, definitely helped me get going with international on-the-ground reporting. And I also won a 2010 fellowship from the University of Arizona’s Center for Science, Policy and Outcomes, to participate in a conference and workshop on science policy and how to report on it. In the spring of 2011, I’ll be heading to Germany for three weeks, as a 2010-2011 McCloy Fellow in Journalism.

Although this wandering lifestyle is less glamorous than it probably sounds, it’s taken me from San Francisco to a physics lab in Geneva, Switzerland (one that featured in Dan Brown’s Angels and Demons), then to Cambridge, England, for several months and an all-too-brief month in Berlin, Germany, then to the other Cambridge, in Massachusetts—and now to Pakistan.

Back in college, I discovered I have a sort of savant-like ability to write backwards and upside-down, even in cursive. I still haven’t found a use for this, but I did get to show it off at the Ig Nobel Prize talks at MIT, which made it onto the cover of the Annals of Improbable Research.

I like writing about nearly any area of science, but physics has a special place in my heart since I’m still trying to justify those four years spent on grueling calculations for my bachelor’s degree more than a decade ago. Lately, my main obsession has been climate change, but I also write about energy and agriculture, evolution and cosmology. Most of my articles have appeared in National Geographic News, New Scientist, and Science, with more in Scientific American Mind, Seed, Technology Review, Nature Reports Climate Change, and other publications.

If you want to get in touch with me, just add a comment below and I will get back to you.

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