About me
I’m an independent science and environmental journalist and audio producer based in the Midwest. I'm passionate about telling nuanced stories focused on humanity's relationship with the natural world, the efforts of scientists striving to understand our changing climate and, more generally, science as a cultural endeavor (and its complicated history).
Recently, I've been focused on covering the myriad ways climate change is destabilizing the Earth's surface and unsettling our understanding of the ground under our feet as stable on human timescales — from giant landslides in Alaska and Nepal to disintegrating coastlines and sinking land in California.
I’ve reported print and digital science feature stories for National Geographic, The Atlantic, Scientific American, Undark, Hakai, bioGraphic, Discover, Sierra, Smithsonian, Science and MIT Technology Review. To tell the story of our rapidly shifting world, I've followed scientists in the field all over—the fjords of Chilean Patagonian in search of cold-water corals, onboard Quinault Nation crab fishing boats in coastal Washington, around soybean farms in rural Iowa and salt marshes on the Chesapeake Bay, into the freezers of ice core labs in Oregon and Switzerland and through tsunami inundation zones and atop giant, moving bedrock landslides in Alaska.
In general, I'm drawn to science done at the edge—both of what we know and literally in places it's difficult for even the most dogged researchers to reach (physically, and in terms of what science institutions and funding structures are set up to support). Places like Antarctica, Alaska, remote fjordlands, the deep sea—ones changing rapidly due to human activity and where science is critical but hard to do.
Beyond my print/digital reporting, I also work as an audio producer for NASA’s flagship agency podcast, Curious Universe, where I've chased eclipses across Texas and watched asteroid samples from outer space parachute down into the Utah desert. Before joining NASA's audio team, I was a production intern for WBEZ, Chicago Public Media, where I produced segments focused on the environment for Reset, the station's two-hour daily news show. I've also worked as a freelance U.S. correspondent for German public broadcaster Deutsche Welle's environmental podcast, Living Planet. I got my start in audio journalism at my hometown public radio station, WVIK, Quad Cities NPR. I have a master's degree in science journalism from Northwestern University's Medill School.
My freelance reporting has won the National Association of Science Writers Science in Society Award in the Commentary category (2026). As a graduate student, I was a finalist for the 2023 Covering Climate Now Journalism Awards in the Student Journalist of the Year category. I was also the the recipient of the Pulitzer Center‘s 2022 Climate Science reporting fellowship. The Pulitzer Center has also generously supported my travel and field reporting in Chile and Alaska through grants.
I've given talks on my reporting at conferences, museums, to university classrooms and on webinars — including at COP28 in Dubai, the McAuliffe-Shepard Discovery Center and the ScienceWriters annual conference. My work for NASA's podcast, Curious Universe has won four Webby Awards, a gold Signal Award, NASA's Story of the Year Award (in 2024 and 2025) and honorable mention in the National Association of Science Writers Best Institutional Writing awards' longform category.
My work has been covered by Iowa Public Radio, Interlochen Public Radio, DW, Chicago Public Media and WHBF. My narrative longform pieces have been featured in Longreads, The Sunday Longread and variety of other neat newsletters (shout-out to Numlock News). My reporting has also been listed in the "notables" section of The Best American Science and Nature Writing.
I trace my love of storytelling to my undergraduate background in environmental science and cultural anthropology — a social science discipline that straddles the boundary between the sciences and the humanities and attempts to explain the complexities of our world through grounded, personal stories. My one academic publication (before I became a journalist) is an ethnography of urban parks published in Columbia University's Consilience journal. Whenever I can, I try to bring ethnographic research, a sense of awe and wonder and that core anthropologic ethos to "make the familiar strange and the strange familiar," to my work.
I'm a proud member of the National Association of Science Writers (NASW) and Society of Environmental Journalists (SEJ), as well as the new regional NASW group MAISE (the Midwest Association of Interdisciplinary Science Expositors 🌽).