I'm a Colorado-based science journalist, contributing editor at Scientific American, and senior contributor at Undark. My articles have also appeared in places like the New York Times, Wired, Popular Science, the Washington Post, Outside, and others. I am the author of the books Making Contact: Jill Tarter and the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, They Are Already Here: UFO Culture and Why We See Saucers, and Countdown: The Blinding Future of Nuclear Weapons. A writing portfolio lives here, and my articles have won the National Academies' Eric and Wendy Schmidt Award for Excellence in Science Communications (2024), American Geophysical Union's David Perlman Award for Excellence in Science Writing (2021), and the American Astronomical Society Solar Physics Division's Popular Media Award (2019, 2020).
In previous lives, I was an associate editor at Astronomy and a public education officer at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Green Bank, West Virginia. When I'm not making sentences or recording our conversations, I enjoy reading books I don't write, running weirdly long distances in the wilderness, teaching my dogs English, and trying to become a better navigator.
In previous lives, I was an associate editor at Astronomy and a public education officer at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Green Bank, West Virginia. When I'm not making sentences or recording our conversations, I enjoy reading books I don't write, running weirdly long distances in the wilderness, teaching my dogs English, and trying to become a better navigator.