I'm an award-winning science journalist and multimedia producer based in New York City. My work has been featured in The Best American Science and Nature Writing, and most recently, I won the prestigious Grimme Online Award and the European Newspaper Award for a multimedia project I produced for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung that was the first journalistic project that used frequency spectrograms to visualize sound on a large scale. The project was also longlisted for the Nannen Preis in the category "Web-Reportage" and is nominated for the GOLDENE KAMERA Digital Award 2017.
I'm one of the authors of The Science Writers' Handbook, an introduction to science and freelance writing (Da Capo Press, 2013); have explained science to 6 million prime time viewers on German national television (ARD); and have produced pieces for German television. My work has appeared in many American and European publications including the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, The Atlantic (online), Nautilus, Quanta Magazine, Nature, Science News, Prevention, Storybench, Cell, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Rheinpfalz am Sonntag, Greenpeace Magazin (Germany) and SonntagsZeitung (Switzerland). I've edited for Nautilus magazine and others. Current projects include shooting video for a multimedia piece for the web site of the German magazine DER SPIEGEL.
I've extensively covered HIV vaccine research, infectious diseases and global health for IAVI Report, an editorially independent publication by the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative, work that has taken me all over the world including India, Africa, China, Southeast Asia, South America, and Europe.
I trained as a print journalist at the Chicago Tribune (where I was a AAAS Mass Media Fellow), at Nature magazine, and at the University of California, Santa Cruz Science Communication Program; studied television production at ifp journalism school in Munich, Germany, and at the BRIC Arts | Media House in Brooklyn, NY; and learned data journalism at Boston University. I write and produce in English and German.
Before I became a journalist, I gave guided tours and over 100 lectures to explain the local wildlife and how environmental pollution affects the oceans on an island off the German coast, and studied biology in Freiburg (Germany), Seattle (WA) and Irvine (CA). My studies of glow-in-the-dark transgenic frogs involved training in microarray technology and bioinformatics and led to a Ph.D. degree in developmental biology.