Oh hello!

If you told nine-year-old me that someday I’d want to travel around the world and write stories about science, I’d have given you a quizzical look, nodded politely, and then checked on the status of the emergency chocolate chip cookie I kept in my backpack, because you clearly weren’t a trustworthy person. Not only did I find science boring as a kid, but I was fully committed to writing a franchise-worthy murder mystery series (so committed, in fact, that my 5th grade teacher called my parents to make sure everything was OK at home).

In high school, boredom shifted to hatred when I began failing my biology class. I’d never failed a class before, and I was too embarrassed to ask for help. One afternoon, my teacher asked me to stay behind for a few minutes. In an incredibly kind and gentle way, he convinced me that I would be doing him a favor by meeting with him outside of class to review the material.

It wasn’t long before I was stopping by his office on a daily basis to chat about everything from gene alteration to plant senescence to the ways in which red blood cells can distort their shapes to squeeze through the tiniest of capillaries. (Thank you, Mr. Koolen, for taking the time to show me how very cool science can be.)

Today, I balance my time between researching fun facts about seals for a book I’m writing and chasing fascinating stories about human-wildlife conflict and coexistence—from wild sheep tracking in Mongolia to the return of white sharks in Cape Cod.

But I still keep an emergency cookie in my bag.