I’m a science writer, photographer, and writing instructor who explores the wonders of nature—its mechanisms and madnesses. For two decades, I’ve been writing and creating stories that center on biological science, evolutionary processes, and conservation. My writing, photographs, and video footage have been published in leading and worthwhile outlets from the BBC to Wild Earth.

Here’s what I ponder:

How does the world work?

What is life, anyway?

Chasing these two questions, I’ve bashed my way up rivers in Madagascar, with spider taxonomists, hunting for Darwin’s spiders; tiptoed in computer labs where scientists are designing the world’s first reproducing living robots; climbed down into caves here in Vermont where I live, over piles of dead bats, following scientists on the hunt for the cause of a deadly wildlife disease; flown up the coast of Greenland in a helicopter with geologists who found signs of ancient forests under a mile of ice sheet; sat in the driver’s seat at the (now destroyed) Arecibo telescope, while it searched the cosmos for wimpy signs of gravity amid the din of the cosmos; bumped across Cuba with scientists who were trying to discover if organic farming really does improve water quality.

UVM Science Writer

Since 2006, I’ve been a staff writer and photographer at the University of Vermont covering all the natural and physical sciences, astronomy to zoology, for UVM publications. I also work with reporters and editors to connect them with UVM experts and research news.

I pay attention to new research and tell stories about what the world is becoming: how changing climate means global weirding is the new normal; how white-nose syndrome in bats gives us new reasons to think about the meaning of holocaust; what it means that more than 90% of the information created by humanity has been produced in the last two years (and that you can get most of it on your cell phone.)

I spend a lot of time asking scientists: How does that work? How do you know? What’s that mean? Can you say that again, this time nice and slow?

My passions are evolutionary science, conservation biology, natural history, and ecology—with particular interests in climate change, biodiversity (say: carnivores!) the natural history of birds and trees (transgenic, clonal, old-growth and otherwise), and extreme endurance sports. Birds! Did I mention birds? But I've also written about gravitational waves; the neurophysiology of anxiety; and self-reproducing living robots.

I even wrote a story about the connection between artisanal cheese, crystals that form in the Arctic Ocean, and the origin of life. (Really. You can read the story here.)

Publications and Photographs

My work has been published in the Boston Globe, Wall Street Journal, US News & World Report, CNN, Wild Earth, Conservation, LiveScience, Land & People (the magazine of the Trust for Public Land), the Burlington Free Press newspaper, Middlebury Magazine, Medill Magazine (Northwestern University School of Journalism), Boston College News, Vermont Medicine, the Center for Biological Diversity newsletter, the NASA homepage, and other outlets.

Over the last decade, I’ve written dozens of articles, including seventeen cover stories, for Vermont Quarterly, the magazine of the University of Vermont, and contributed many articles for UVM Today, an online newsmagazine.

Above all, I scramble to be there--acrid bat cave, hissing laboratory, mountaintop peatbog, lake-bottom shipwreck, tree-top field site--where people gather the strange fragments of insight, intuition, data, and observation that we call science.

There's a lot coming forth from science that just has to be seen to be believed--and understood.

Sure, a lot of scientists are patient folk who sit at their computers quietly considering P values, doing the Lord's work (or looking for the God Particle perhaps) in hard-won increments. But there's also a lot of busting forth, mountain-top expeditions, audacious blustering, gorgeous mistakes, skeptical banter, brilliant thinking, crazy jargon, bruised egos, bad coffee, and delighted shouts of amazement from that strange species called Homo scientificus—that makes being a science writer fantastically interesting.

To do all this seeing, writing, and photographing I have the great good fortune of a day job: being a writer and teacher at the University of Vermont fills my days with lab visits, field trips, new research—and wonder.

Interviews

I’ve published interviews with Jonathan Safran Foer, author of Eating Animals; Michael Mann, leading climate scientist; Paul Ehrlich, author of Population Bomb; Gro Harlem Brundtland, former prime minister of Norway; Elizabeth Kolbert, environmental reporter for the New Yorker magazine; Mike Fay, National Geographic explorer; Andy Revkin, former New York Times environment reporter; Herman Daly, World Bank economist; Jerome Ringo, president of the Apollo Alliance; Kerry Emanuel, the world’s leading hurricane expert; David Sloan Wilson, evolutionary biologist; and others.

Wild Earth Magazine

For nearly five years, from 2000 through 2004, I worked as staff writer and senior editor for Wild Earth, a national conservation journal that combined science reporting and nature writing. I wrote feature articles, book reviews, and interviews, as well as developed issue themes, solicited articles from authors, evaluated story pitches, and edited copy.

Rutland-Herald Newspaper

I contributed several dozen articles to the Rutland Herald newspaper’s environment pages from 2008 to 2014.

Freelance Writer

From 2004 to 2006, I worked as a full-time freelance writer and editor, completing articles and projects for the Boston Globe, National Audubon Society (New Hampshire), Conservation Magazine, Northeast Wilderness Trust, Burlington Free Press, and other clients. I began freelance writing in 1997, writing a 47-page booklet for Peter Clavelle, the then-mayor of Burlington, VT, on projects across the city aimed at sustainability. These days, by moonlight, I keep one thumb in the freelancers pie, taking on occasional assignments.

Video

In December 2017, I collaborated with the BBC on a video project for their children’s program Beyond Bionic, about Darwin’s Bark Spiders (Caerostris darwini), using photographs and video I shot in the rainforests of eastern Madagascar. In 2014, I contributed my video footage from Greenland and co-wrote the script for a news story on ice science produced by the Wall Street Journal.

Teaching

• Since 2018, I’ve been part of the faculty in the University of Vermont’s Field Naturalist graduate program where I teach two courses on science and professional writing. You can read more about the program here.  From 2006 to 2018, I taught an undergraduate course on environmental journalism through the Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources.

Awards and Invited Presentations

I received a National Association of Science Writers Career Grant in 2010 and was an invited speaker at the Vermont Governor’s Institute on Climate Change in 2007, 2008 and 2020. In 1993, I won an award as a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Scholar and I received the Saint Andrews Society Fellowship in 1991.

Education

B.A.-Brown University, Providence, RI, 1990

            Modern Culture and Media

M.Th. (equivalent to M.Sc.)-University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, Scotland, 1992

            Intellectual and Ecclesiastical History of the 19th Century: Science and Religion

The Rest of My Life

I'm married to a wildlife biologist, Zoe Richards, the director of Burlington Wildways. We have three delightful kids. I love to run in the semi-wilds of Burlington. Generally, I run fast, telemark ski as much as I can, and eat slowly.