I am a freelance science writer based in Berkeley, California. I have written on topics as varied as math, geology, ecology, and once even hamster sex. The purpose of this site is to familiarize you with my work and my style of writing.

To start off, I would like to get rid of the word "science." It's a great word, but by no fault of its own it has picked up a little too much baggage over the years. I prefer "the way stuff works." Biology becomes "the way life works." Astronomy would be "the way really big stuff works." Molecular chemistry becomes "the way atoms have a high probability of working" and quantum physics "the way stuff probably doesn't work at all." This sums up my philosophy of science writing. It should be fun, accessible and accurate. After all, science is something we all like, we just don't know it. Like economics, politics, and every other discipline known to man, too often the way stuff works has become bogged down in details and jargon, alienating the common reader. But it doesn't have to be this way.

I often think of a day I spent in my previous life as a professional biologist tagging shorebirds in Cape Agulus, South Africa. I was on this tiny island just off the coast looking for oystercatchers, an obsidian bird with a bright orange bill. The island was a former guano mine and smelled oppressingly like its former chief export. At one point, I found myself flat on my stomach, face practically in a pile of bird dung and inches away from a dead, rotting shorebird, reaching as far back as I could for a fluffy little ball of baby oystercatcher. Finally, after scrabbling about for a while I had the little bird in hand and he proceeded to crap on my pants. Twice. It occurred to me that this bizarre scene, which would not even be mentioned in the final report of the results, was at the heart of science. Science is messy. It's uncomfortable. It's boring and exciting and really hard to explain in just a few sentences. There's good science, bad science, but mostly it's some combination of the two. And until you have worked as a scientist, it's my firm belief that you really can't write about it (with Bill Bryson as the one possible exception).

I have a pretty well rounded resume from my corner of biology. In college I studied ecology and animal behavior and published in the Journal of Comparative Psychology. After that, I interned with several PhD and Master's projects at University of Cape Town in South Africa. Then I worked in environmental advocacy with an Oakland-based group, Save The Bay. After that, I jumped to the dark side of biology and worked for several environmental consultants to construction companies. I like to think this gives me a realistic idea of the way science is conducted, perceived, legislated, and enacted by industry. I am a graduate of the Science Communication program at the University of California, Santa Cruz (the second oldest of its kind). The notoriously intense program there was designed for professional scientists to become writers, rather than professional writers wanting to learn about science.

Today, although I am no longer current in ethology or ornithology, my background allows me to write about a variety of subjects. I have worked for the The Chronicle of Higher Education, Nature, The New York Times, Conservation, Discover, Mental Floss, and the Utne Reader. Anyway, that's about it. Because this is my website I am going to skip the smooth ending and just stop here. But please enjoy my work and feel free to contact me with questions.