I am an independent science writer, and for most of the last 20 years I’ve worked from an office shed in my backyard in Nashville, Tennessee. My first book was a young adult biography of Sophie Germain, a French mathematician who taught herself calculus during the French Revolution and who made significant contributions to the theory of elasticity and unpacking Fermat’s Last Theorem. My second book, Math Art: Truth, Beauty, and Equations, highlighted the work of artists inspired by math; it includes gorgeous images of sculptures, paintings, digital works, and quilts. I created a limited podcast series, Calculated, to accompany the book. It featured more stories at the intersection of math and culture. You can also some of the images from the book in this gallery. My latest book, A Brief History of the End of the Universe and Everything in It, delves into the interconnected science and humanity of decomposition, decay, and regeneration.
As a writer, I’m all over the place. I’ve written about the math of pizza slicing and the intricacies of tumor banking, the synthetic biologists who worry that their work will destroy the world and the cosmologists who debate how the universe will end. I’ve archived most of my articles on my Substack page, which you can access through the “Writings” tab above.
My work has been recognized with awards from the AAAS/Kavli Foundation, AHCJ, ASJA, and the Houston Methodist Research Institute, and I’ve given talks on various aspects of science writing at the University of Georgia, the Houston Methodist Research Institute, the Southern Festival of Books, SMU (my undergrad alma mater), and elsewhere. I contributed two chapters to the Science Writers’ Handbook and have had my work included in the Best American Science and Nature Writing series.
I am a Writer in Residence at Vanderbilt University’s Program in the Communication of Science and Technology, where I teach classes on writing multimedia science stories, creating podcasts, and writing essays. I’ve mentored aspiring science writers through the AAAS, the Open Notebook, and other organizations.
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 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. Kate, my wife, is a nurse-midwife, and my children sometimes conspire to create their own language.