Writing
Over the years, my writing has appeared in a number of publications. These include Nature, Nautilus, The Scientist, Undark, PNAS, Spacing Magazine, Hakai, the Forbes.com website, BOLD blog and various other places. You can also find some of my older writing in the books The Open Laboratory (2009) and The Best Science Writing Online (2012).
More recently, I won the ABSW Award for Opinion Piece or Editorial of the Year 2020, and received a Falling Walls and Berlin Science Week journalism grant that same year.
Writing samples
I’ve included an occasionally updated selection of my articles below. This list covers topics in genetics, health, citizen science, education, and the overlap of science and the arts. But if you want to read even more, please visit my Muckrack profile or browse this very long list of almost everything (but it’s rarely up to date). And finally, if you want to keep up with new writing, please subscribe to my newsletter or follow me on Twitter to get the latest updates.
- Language barriers in conservation research could be hurting biodiversity efforts. What can be done about it? – Ensia
- Broken Horizon: UK medical research struggling with funding and collaborations gap after Brexit – British Medical Journal
- Using a board game to plan for a changing planet – Hakai (Featured in ABSW Monthly Showcase, May 2022)
- Remote education inspires new ways to teach chemistry lab courses – C&EN
- George Washington Carver was an artist long before he became a peanut scientist – Forbes.com
- Genetic Medicine Is Poised to Create New Inequality. Here’s How to Fix It. – Undark (2020 ABSW Award in Opinion/Editorial)
- How MC Hammer And Other Performing Artists Are Sharing Their Love Of Science – Forbes.com
- Researchers embrace fashion to show off science concepts – PNAS
- What does a coronavirus look like? – Forbes.com
- Communicating science at a music festival — with 135,000 attendees – Nature
- High School Students Do Better In Science, Math And English If They Also Take Music Lessons – Forbes.com
- Life After Sequencing – The Scientist
- Whatever Happened to Francis Crick? – Popular Science
- Glacier lessons as a glacier lessens – Hakai
- Wildlife education with Pokemon Go – BOLD
- How we got from Doc Brown to Walter White – Nautilus
A note on journalism and content writing
The sample articles above are mostly journalistic pieces, but some of my science writing is content writing for clients. You can see some examples of this sort of work on the science communication page, and it even overlaps with community management (for example through writing social media posts).
These content pieces will sometimes (but not always) have my name on them, and they’re written to serve a particular purpose. This could be a sponsored article in a publication, or content for a client’s website. To make the difference clear, this long list of my writing includes both journalism and content/explanatory pieces, and explains the different categories.