Freelance Writing
My first newsstand piece was a New Scientist cover story on underwater propulsion inspired by jellyfish; Before that, I wrote subscriber-only pieces for The Sciences on whether the moon Europa resembles an early Earth, and for Scholastic’s Science World on a technique for capturing the scent of live plants. Today, I’m a columnist for the AIP/IEEE mag Computing in Science and Engineering. My stories bridge the gaps between different disciplines to point out key areas where collaboration can advance research — and they are often among the magazine’s most-downloaded stories. Some favorites: the epidemiology of infectious diseases, digital means for discovering art forgeries, the dawn of digital libraries, and the rush to preserve recordings of rare birdsong.
For university magazines, I’ve written about the unique culture of a cosmology research center (the origin of the galaxy-in-a-coffee-cup graphic you see here), a married couple of astrophysicists; the challenges of being a NASA engineer, and some quirky materials for next-generation electronics, among other stories.