Personal Background
I started out studying animal science and biology in college with the intention of going to veterinary school. A few years in, I realized that, as much as I enjoyed taking care of the horses on the farm that had become my second home during school, the bond between horses and people was just as fascinating to me as the animals themselves.
That insight led me to search for similar relationships in how we humans relate to each other and the creatures that also call this planet home. After studying a bit of (mostly ancient) philosophy and with a spectacular field zoology class, during which I ran wild over half a dozen islands and the water in between on Lake Erie studying the region's fauna for a summer, I finished college.
I soon went in search of bigger waters and landed an internship on a whale watch talking to 
passengers about the whales we were seeing and the environment, as well as collecting data for a nonprofit organization called the Ocean Alliance. In more than a hundred trips out to Stellwaggen Bank in the Atlantic Ocean (northeast of Boston), I never got tired of seeing these bizarre creatures, the biggest animals that had ever lived. It was eye-opening to watch as they struggled to come back from the challenges posed by an increasingly loud, polluted and fishless ocean and several centuries of intense hunting. For having survived for so long, they now desperately need help from the very ones - us - who had them in that predicament.
After leaving Massachussetts, a two-month trip to the Maldives to help out with Ocean Alliance’s sperm whale research took me beyond the shores of North America for the first time in my life. The finger-sized blubber samples we collected read like a history of the impacts of industrialization on the environment, each one a storehouse of the chemicals we’ve released into the ocean that have found their way up the food chain. When I returned to the States, I spent several months slicing, mounting and staining these samples at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution to decipher just what they could tell us about how we’ve been treating the ocean and what we need to do in the future to clean up our act.
Then, I took another turn in the continuing path toward understanding how all of us who share this planet relate to each other. Perhaps not surprisingly, living for two years among the Hausas of Niger as a Peace Corps volunteer convinced me of how important and tenuous our connection is to the place where we make our homes. Most of the country’s 14 million people live in the quasi-desert Sahel, the band of acacia-filled dry savanna that girds the widest part of Africa lying north of the equator. Once-yearly rains make farming possible, but the Sahara’s southward creep—the world’s largest desert already makes up two-thirds of the country—and one of the fastest growing populations on earth make food security, water access and healthcare of dire importance.
To solve these types of problems, we’ll have to use every tool at our disposal. Most folks working in development these days understand that just handing out food only makes the problem worse. But what does science have to say about all this?
From what I’ve seen, a lot. Smart people are working to understand markets and the impacts of globalization, predict the challenges that those living hand-to-mouth will face in a changing climate, and deliver food and other resources to where they’re needed most. The media largely ignores this sophisticated problem solving, in favor of reporting on—and in some cases overblowing—famines and natural disasters. On the surface, it makes sense: pictures and footage of babies with bloated bellies garner more attention than tie-dyed patterned maps of sea surface temperatures and tables chock full of dry (though telling) economic data, telling though both may be.
A beautiful aspect of science is its focus on teasing apart the mysteries of how the world works. Indeed, you could argue that’s its very reason for being. The sort of nuanced understanding that
scientific study provides is just as relevant to determining drought patterns in the Sahel as it is at figuring out how whales sleep or how ribosomes string together building-block proteins from the codes found in RNA molecules.
So that's a lot of what you'll find me writing about—the ways in which scientists leverage knowledge to solve problems and generally make the world a better place. I also cover the environment and wildlife, in part because I just find that sort of stuff cool, but also because, in all my travels and deviations along my path to becoming a science writer, I found it's all connected in some way, just as we all are.