I am an independent science writer who works from an office shed in my backyard in Nashville, Tennessee. My book Math Art: Truth, Beauty, and Equations, which highlights the work of artists inspired by math, was published in April 2019. I also launched a podcast, Calculated, in conjunction with the book.

I’ve written about the mathematics of pizza slicing for New Scientist, tumor banking for CR (now Cancer Today), and extrasolar planets for Discover. I have covered stories from astronomy, physics, cancer research and mathematics; I’m a regular contributor to Science News for Students, an educational website, and a contributor and researcher for Cancer Today magazine. I teach undergraduate classs on science communication as a Writer-in-Residence at Vanderbilt University, and I’ve given talks on the subject at Murray State University, Southern Methodist University, the Houston Methodist Research Institute, the Southern Festival of Books, Vanderbilt, and elsewhere.

For a list of where my work has been published, click on publications above. In 2022, I won a Kavli/AAAS Award (silver, writing for children) for a story on what we can learn from dead whales. In 2017, I won the Bricker Prize for Science Writing in Medicine from Houston Methodist, and a video of my talk is available here. In 2016, I received a Kavli/AAAS Award for a story about lightning I wrote for Science News for Students. In 2013, I received an award from the American Society of Journalists and Authors for “Interrupting cancer’s travel plans,” an article about the science of metastases that appeared in Cancer Today, and in 2010, the Association of Health Care Journalists recognized an article I wrote for CR titled “What happens to a donated tumor?“

I graduated from Southern Methodist University with degrees in physics and English, studied applied math in graduate school at the University of Missouri, and I’m a graduate of MIT’s Graduate Program in Science Writing. My first book, a young adult biography of Sophie Germain, was published in 2008. Read an excerpt here. I contributed two chapters to the Science Writers’ Handbook (2013).

My non-science nonfiction has been published in the New Haven Review and McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, and my fiction has appeared in One Story, Vestal Review, Arcadia, Bartleby Snopes, and Prime Number Magazine, and McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. My wife, Kate, is a nurse-midwife, and my children sometimes conspire to create their own language.