About

I am an award-winning independent journalist covering science and the environment, with a special interest in the rapidly changing Arctic. I’ve reported extensively from the High North, including Greenland, Canada, the Arctic Ocean, and multiple trips throughout Iceland and Arctic Norway. One of my main goals as a journalist is to highlight the people and beauty of these remote places, while raising awareness of the pressing threats they face.

But my interests span the globe. I’ve reported from my home in California to Africa, Europe to Antarctica, on a range of topics including earth sciences, oceans, natural resources, wildlife, and energy. My articles have appeared in Smithsonian Magazine, National Geographic, Yale Environment 360, Scientific American, Eos, Hakai, and elsewhere.

I am honored to receive the 2024 Outstanding Science Writing Award from the American Society of Journalists and Authors for my Smithsonian Magazine story about plunging populations of iconic Atlantic puffins, and the Icelandic town fighting to save them. Other awards include Grand Prize in the Writers Digest Writing Competition, two honorable mentions for Science Writing from the ASJA, an Outstanding Feature Writing Award from the Society of Environmental Journalists, and an honorable mention for the Oakes Award. I’m also grateful for several fellowships and reporting grants. Thanks to the Institute for Journalism and Natural Resources, I traveled to Arctic Canada’s Nunavut territory in 2021 to report on some of the ways Inuit communities are coping with environmental change. The resulting Hakai Magazine story was noted in The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2023. In 2019, I spent nearly three weeks on a Norwegian Polar Institute icebreaker in the Fram Strait. I have also traveled to the top of the Greenland Ice Sheet as a National Science Foundation invited media visitor, been a marine science journalism fellow at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, and accompanied several scientific expeditions as an embedded journalist.

A former newspaper reporter with a bachelor’s degree in biology, chemistry and French, and a master’s in science communication, I am a Minnesota native who now lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. I am also an avid sailor, and when not out in the field or hunched over my computer, I’m sailing the California coast as often as possible.

Professional Affiliations

• National Association of Science Writers
• Society of Environmental Journalists
• Board member, Northern California Science Writers Association