Field-Of-Study: Science Writing

Thor Hanson was born and raised in the Pacific Northwest, where he now lives on an island with his wife and son.  He caught his first salmon at age four, and often collected a wide array of temporary summertime pets, from caterpillars and tadpoles to garter snakes, hermit crabs, and tree frogs.  His early interest

Amy Harmon is a New York Times reporter who seeks to illuminate the human dilemmas posed by advances in science through narrative storytelling. Her stories aim to inform readers about science by engaging them emotionally in classic narratives—with characters, conflict, and suspense—a form employed perhaps more often in reporting on war or politics or poverty.

Renowned astrophysicist and award-winning science writer, Ray Jayawardhana is a Professor and Canada Research Chair in Observational Astrophysics at the University of Toronto. A graduate of Yale and Harvard, he uses many of the world’s largest telescopes to explore planetary origins and diversity. He is the coauthor of over one hundred papers in scientific journals.

Stuart Firestein is the Chair of Columbia University’s Department of Biological Sciences where he and his colleagues study the vertebrate olfactory system, possibly the best chemical detector on the face of the planet.   Aside from its molecular detection capabilities, the olfactory system serves as a model for investigating general principles and mechanisms of signaling and

A resident of Berkeley, California, for most of my life, I have pursued a lifelong interest in photography and nature while also working as a carpenter and contractor.  With Sylvia Sharnoff, I carried out the photographic fieldwork for Lichens of North America (Brodo, Sharnoff & Sharnoff, Yale University Press, 2001.)  My images have appeared in

Janna Levin is a theoretical physicist and a writer. She has contributed to an understanding of astrophysical black holes, the cosmology of extra dimensions, and gravitational waves in the shape of spacetime. Levin integrates scientific themes in both fiction and nonfiction. Her second book—a novel, A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines (Knopf, 2006)—won the PEN/Bingham

From his tree-lined studio, high on a hill above the Tongass Narrows in rain-swept Ketchikan, Alaska, Ray Troll draws and paints fishy images that migrate into museums, books, and magazines and onto t-shirts sold around the planet. Basing his quirky, aquatic images on the latest scientific discoveries, Ray brings a street-smart sensibility to the worlds

The View from Lazy Point: A Natural Year in an Unnatural World (Henry Holt, 2011), the writing of which was supported by his Guggenheim Fellowship, is just the latest in an impressive line of books on marine conservation that have earned Carl Safina a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant, a Pew Scholar’s Award in Conservation, the

A longtime staff writer for The New Yorker and formerly a reporter and columnist for The New York Times, Elizabeth Kolbert has largely focused her writings during the last decade on the issue of climate change. “The Climate of Man” (2005), her three-part series for The New Yorker on the hotly debated and often confusing