Maya Wei-Haas is a writer for National Geographic, where she writes about all things science, with a particular affection for rocks and reactions. Before that she was an assistant science editor for Smithsonianmag.com’s Smart News, which turns a Smithsonian lens on daily events. She began her career as a scientist, earning a PhD in environmental chemistry at Ohio State University, and made the jump to writing with the AAAS Mass Media Fellowship.
Sabrina Imbler is a freelance science writer and essayist based in Brooklyn, New York. Her work has appeared in Atlas Obscura, The New York Times, The Atlantic, Gay Magazine, and others. Her chapbook about volcanoes, Dyke (geology), is out with Black Lawrence Press, and her essay collection about sea creatures is forthcoming with Little, Brown in 2022.
Sara Shipley Hiles is an associate professor of professional practice at the University of Missouri School of Journalism. Before teaching, she was a freelance journalist and staff writer at publications including The Times-Picayune in New Orleans and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. She specializes in science, health, and environmental journalism and serves on the board of the Society of Environmental Journalists.
Jane J. Lee is a science writer and editor based in Los Angeles, California. She spent three and a half years at Nature as a news editor and, before that, three years as a reporter and editor at National Geographic. Her work has also appeared in Science, Wired.com, The San Jose Mercury News, and other publications. Jane is an alumna of the Science Communication Program at UC Santa Cruz and has a master’s in marine biology from UCLA.
Helen Ouyang is an emergency physician, a writer, and an assistant professor at Columbia University. She has written for The Atlantic, Harper’s, the Los Angeles Times, New York, The New Yorker, The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, and others. She was a 2018 National Magazine Award finalist.
Joshua Sokol is a science writer in the Boston area. He studied astronomy and English literature in college, worked as a data analyst for the Hubble Space Telescope, and then attended MIT’s Graduate Program in Science Writing. Since 2016 he has been a freelancer covering space and other topics in natural history for publications like Quanta, Science, The New York Times, and whoever else will look at his pitches.
Eli Chen reports on scientific research and environmental issues at St. Louis Public Radio. Her work has appeared in or aired on NPR, Marketplace, WHYY’s The Pulse, The New York Times, Science Friday, and Scientific American. Born and raised in the Chicago suburbs, her role model growing up was Sue the T. rex at the Field Museum, because everyone should aspire to become an apex predator.
Mark Peplow is a freelance science journalist based near Cambridge, U.K., who splits his time between writing and editing. He previously spent four years as Nature’s news editor, two years as editor of Chemistry World, and two years as a physical sciences reporter at Nature. He really likes chemistry.
Virginia Hughes is the science editor at BuzzFeed News, where she manages five reporters focused on the darker side of science. Before that she was a freelancer reporting on genetics, neuroscience, and medicine. Her writing has appeared in Nature, Popular Science, The New York Times, and twice in the Best American Science and Nature Writing anthology. She grew up in Michigan and now lives with her husband, daughter, and energetic dog in Brooklyn, New York.
Amy Maxmen is a senior reporter at Nature, based in San Francisco. She has written about Ebola, evolution, machine learning, and much more.
Ashley Smart is the associate director of the Knight Science Journalism Program at MIT and a senior editor at Undark magazine. He joined KSJ in 2018, after eight years as an editor at Physics Today. He is a member of the advisory board of the Council for the Advancement of Science Writing and a co-chair of the National Association of Science Writers diversity committee. Ashley was a 2015–16 Knight Science Journalism fellow.
Megha Satyanarayana worked at several newspapers and an online news startup before landing at Chemical & Engineering News. She has covered suburban crime, public health, science and technology, and much more. She also knows a bit about audience engagement and multimedia reporting, and is happy to have landed back in Texas, where sentences start, end, and contain in all grammatical spaces the word y’all, and it works. Really.
Shannon Palus is a journalist based in Brooklyn. She is a senior staff writer at Wirecutter, where she primarily covers health tech and personal care. Her freelance work has appeared in Scientific American, Slate, Popular Science, New Scientist, The Atlantic, Discover, and elsewhere.
Anna Kuchment is a staff science writer at The Dallas Morning News, a contributing editor at Scientific American, and a former reporter and writer at Newsweek magazine. She is a coauthor, with Boston College historian Conevery Bolton Valencius, of the forthcoming book Shaky Ground: The Untold Story of the Largest Earthquake Surge in Modern History, which tells the story of the dramatic rise in earthquakes linked to oil and gas production.
Kat McGowan is a journalist and editor focused on medicine and science. As an editor, she currently works with Grist and Neo Life; her most recent bylines were for Popular Science, Mother Jones, Scientific American, and STAT. She was formerly a consulting editor at the autism science publication Spectrum, a special projects editor at Discover, and senior editor at Psychology Today. She also volunteers at a wildlife hospital and is an active member of the crow team.
Maryn McKenna is a freelancer focused on public and global health and food policy, the author of three books, and a senior fellow of the Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism at Brandeis University. She is a columnist for Wired and has written for The New York Times Magazine, Mother Jones, National Geographic, and many others. Her stories have been anthologized in numerous collections. She appeared in the 2014 documentary Resistance, and her 2015 TED Talk has been viewed 1.6 million times.
For nearly 15 years, George Musser was a senior editor at Scientific American focusing on astronomy and fundamental physics. He thought of himself as the magazine’s Mars correspondent, although tight budgets stopped him from taking up his post. He left the Sci Am staff in 2012 to write his second book, Spooky Action at a Distance , and do a Knight Fellowship. Since then he has been a freelancer, still writing for Sci Am , but also Nautilus , Quanta , and others.
Becky Lang is executive editor of the Kalmbach Media Science Group and editor in chief of Discover magazine, where she’s worked since early 2013. She moved to the magazine world from newspapers after 11 years as the health/science/environment editor at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. She’s been writing and editing as a job since high school, when she covered minor league baseball in Helena, Montana (the Milwaukee Brewers’ farm team—go figure). She’s a graduate of Northwestern University.
Sandeep Ravindran is a freelance science writer based in New York City. He has written about life sciences and technology for publications such as Smithsonian, National Geographic News, Nature, The Scientist, Wired, Popular Science, and Science News for Students. Before becoming a science writer he received a microbiology PhD from Stanford University and studied science communication at UC Santa Cruz.
Max Ufberg is the digital director of Pacific Standard, where he oversees the magazine’s online editorial operations. He joined the magazine in 2015 and has since written about a range of topics including addiction, the alt-right, and Big Oil. Most of his time is spent editing, and he’s edited stories that have appeared in the Best American series and have been finalists for national awards.
Anahad O’Connor is a bestselling author and staff reporter for The New York Times. He covers consumer health, writing about topics such as nutrition, chronic disease, obesity, and the food industry. He joined the paper in 2003 and has covered everything from business to politics and culture. His focus since 2011 has been the intersection of food and health. A graduate of Yale, he is the author of four books, and currently lives in San Francisco.
Chrissie Giles studied biochemistry at the University of Leeds in England. Concluding that clumsiness and practical science do not mix, she completed a master’s in science communication at Imperial College London in 2003 and has been working as a writer and editor ever since. Her editorial career began in a medical communications agency and, via a brief stint in the heady world of motor caravan journalism, she now writes and edits stories on biology, health, and research for U.K. foundation Wellcome and is editor of Mosaic.
Alicia Chang is a health and science editor for The Associated Press based in New York. She joined the AP in 2000 and served as the Los Angeles–based science writer for a decade. She is a 2018 Tow-Knight entrepreneurial journalism fellow at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism and was a 2015–16 Knight Science Journalism fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She was the 2009 recipient of the Evert Clark/Seth Payne Award for young science journalists.
Annalee Newitz is the tech culture editor at Ars Technica and the founding editor of io9. Previously, she was the editor-in-chief of popular tech site Gizmodo. She’s the author of Scatter, Adapt, and Remember: How Humans Will Survive a Mass Extinction, which was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Her first science fiction novel, Autonomous, was published today. Her nonfiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Wired, and many other outlets.
Including diverse voices in science stories ensures more accurate and complete stories that more fully reflect and inform readers, and is the equitable thing to do. On this page, we compile detailed and specific resources and strategies for making that goal a reality.
The articles in this collection from The Open Notebook—on topics such as covering preprint manuscripts, interviewing people who have experienced trauma, spotting shady statistics, avoiding spreading misinformation, and more—are especially relevant for anyone covering the coronavirus pandemic.
Good Transitions: A Guide to Cementing Stories Together
COVID-19 Reporting Diaries: March 25–31, 2020
How to Talk to Your Facebook Friends about Fake News
Journalists as Characters: Using First-Person Narration to Drive Stories
Making Your Writing and Reporting Transgender-Inclusive
Data Journalists’ Roundtable: Visualizing the Pandemic
Writing When on the Autism Spectrum
There’s No One Path to Becoming an Editor
Interrogating Data: A Science Writer’s Guide to Data Journalism
Good Endings: How to Write a Kicker Your Editor—and Your Readers—Will Love
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