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I'm a science and nature writer.
Lucky me! I get to interview the top women in STEM for Smore magazine's cover feature, Science Like a Girl! And also contribute to Earth Science, Animal Engineering, and Biotech. My kids science and nature writing has also been published in Muse, Cricket, and Spider magazines. When I'm not writing, I'm on a mountain search and rescue team or out exploring wild places. I've climbed soaring granite faces and tip-toed precariously on knife-edge ridges. I've been charged by a mountain lion. Piranhas have nibbled my toes. I've climbed many, many trees, including a coast redwood tree 300 feet tall. I've been a forest ecologist for thirty years, but honestly, my research publications are pretty dry reading. |
Recent published pieces...
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Kristen Marhaver - Coral Champion
MY COVER FEATURE ARTICLE: Kristen Marhaver is a scuba diver, a coral reef champion, and mom to thousands of baby corals! Kristen is optimistic about coral reefs. “Anytime you’re working with coral reproduction it’s impossible to be hopeless. It’s so inspiring to see what a baby coral can do. And when you’re in a lab surrounded by thousands of them, you just know there’s a chance for coral reefs.” Science Like a Girl, Smore Magazine Summer 2024 |
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Fungus Among Us - Nature's Networkers
Fungus—until recently sidelined and ignored—may be the organism that revolutionizes how we humans think about ourselves, and our place in the world. Fungi are all round us—and in us—supporting life as we know it. By connecting us humans in a vast network, by partnering with us over millions of years, and by showing all the ways we can thrive in a complex changing world, fungi have shaped who we are and our place in the biosphere. Earth Sciences, Smore Magazine Summer 2024 |
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Earthquakes Shake it Off!
What do earthquakes and Taylor Swift have in common? They Shake it Off! Did you know that fans at a Taylor Swift concert boogied so hard to Shake it Off that sensors recorded a 2.3 magnitude earthquake? A Swift Quake! Read the story! Earth Sciences, Smore Magazine Spring 2024 |
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Smart Grids for a Smarter Electric Future - Sascha von Meier
MY COVER FEATURE ARTICLE: Sascha von Meier is an energy grid expert, working with California to design an energy future using smart technology. During a heatwave in 2019, California’s largest electric utilities pulled the plug on two-and-a-half million people to prevent the electric grid from sparking and starting a blaze. Kids didn’t go to school, businesses closed, food spoiled because refrigerators were off, and hospitals ran on backup generators to keep patients alive. It wasn't California's first massive blackout and the utilities promised it wouldn't be the last. Sascha knows there's a smarter way to manage the grid. Read the story! Science Like a Girl, Smore Magazine December 2023 |
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Bio-printing -- The Race to Save Lives
Imagine painting with body cells! Dip your brush in bone ink and paint bones. Or dab some muscle paint on canvas and watch it move. Paint nerves, veins, skin and more until you’ve finished your masterpiece. Voila! That’s the basic idea behind bio-printing, a very real and fast-growing area of science. Read the story! Biotech, Smore Magazine December 2023 |
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A Sky Full of Courage
Sam, 5th grade bird fanatic, is afraid to fly, even though Mom is a top-notch pilot. When 10,000 migrating swifts go missing―the birds that roost every September in Sam’s elementary school smokestack―his avian expertise is their only hope. Sam hatches a bird-brained plan to rescue the swifts, but he’ll need to overcome his fear of planes. What he has in mind will take a sky full of courage, but it might save more than the birds. The story is beautifully illustrated by Angela Holland. Read the story! Cricket Magazine, October 2023 |
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Eating Bugs - The Future of Food with Valerie Stull
MY COVER FEATURE ARTICLE: By 2050, the earth is expected to be teeming with nine billion people. That’s two billion more mouths to feed than today. What are all those people going to eat? Valerie Stull, environmental health scientist, is working hard on that tough question. Her vision: Bugs as a healthy, sustainable future of food. I dive into her journey from a sports-loving tomboy to her career as a scientist who believes humans should eat more insects. Science Like a Girl, Smore Magazine Fall 2023 |
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The Surprising Intelligence of the Octopus
Imagine a creature with blue blood, three hearts, and no skeleton—earthling or alien? Meet the octopus, the most intelligent invertebrate on our planet! Even though the octopus is built nothing like us, its intelligence is surprisingly similar to not only humans, but also to animals we call smart, like dolphins, dogs, crows, and elephants. This puzzle has scientists scurrying to study the octopus more. Beautifully illustrated by Tanvi Gokhale. Read the story! Animal Engineering, Smore Magazine Fall 2023 |
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DNA Hunting in the Jungle with Mrinalini Erkenswick Watsa
MY COVER FEATURE ARTICLE: Mrinalini is a wildlife conservation biologist, the first to bring portable low-cost genetic techniques to the remotest landscapes on earth to save endangered animals. She teaches genetics in the jungle. "If you can cook, you can do genetics," she says. She's trained over 300 conservationists, 70% of them are women. Read the story! Science Like a Girl, Smore Magazine Summer 2023 |
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Science@Work: Suzanne Simard
Most people look at a forest and see trees reaching for the sky. Suzanne Simard sees trees holding hands underground. Dr. Simard is a forest ecologist—a scientist studying forest patterns and relationships—at the University of British Columbia in Canada. She’s followed tree roots to an astounding new discovery, that trees share and communicate through an underground network. Her science inspired the Tree of Souls in the movie “Avatar” and has forever changed the way we understand forests. Read the story! Muse Magazine April 2023 |
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Going With the Floe
Professor Polar Bear and Professor Penguin were teaching a class together. The topic? Sea ice! Both were experts―Professor Polar Bear lived in the Arctic and Professor Penguin lived in the Antarctic―so they should have agreed on everything, right? Wrong! Halfway through the class, they faced off—nose to beak—their mood chilly. What could be so different about sea ice in the Arctic versus the Antarctic? Well, apparently lots. Read the story! Earth Science, Smore Magazine Summer 2023 |
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Paper Princess
Ellie’s sure that her origami dragons, when finished, will give her courage to stand up to anything, including name-calling Sandra DuPont. I’m not a “farm hick”, I’m a princess in disguise. But when a wild storm sweeps across her Iowa farm, even a princess must dig deep for true courage when paper courage fails. Read it! Spider Magazine April 2023 |
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S.O.S. ― Save Our Snow!
When you think of snow, you probably think of winter—snowball fights and snowflakes melting on your tongue. But snow’s most dynamic season is actually spring. Spring’s warm, sunny days are when snow’s best features shine. Snow is not just for skiers and sledders. Food and electricity come from snow. As climate change warms our planet and melts snow, spring snow has a complicated role to play. All sorts of people are racing to save our snow, with solutions both big and small, whacky and wonderful. And some of them are kids. Read it! Smore Magazine Spring 2023 |
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Fossils ― Nature's Time Capsules Do you love to solve puzzles? Are you willing to time-travel? Then pack your curiosity and get ready for adventure—we're going fossil-hunting! Featuring paleontologist Lisa White, director of the University of California’s Museum of Paleontology, who brings fossils from her museum’s five million specimens—everything from dinosaur bones to teeny microfossils—to underserved classrooms around the San Francisco Bay Area. Read it! Smore Magazine Winter 2022 |
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What's So Wild About Wildfire? Have you ever been mesmerized by flames? Whether it’s a crackling campfire or the tip of a birthday candle, fire is spellbinding. But fire can also be unpredictable and dangerous. Taming fire is like taming a tiger—you always risk it going wild. Featuring fire-fighting fire ecologist Lenya Quinn-Davidson, who trains ordinary citizens to safely set prescribed fires on their lands to prevent megafires. Read it! Smore Magazine Fall 2022 |
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The Mineral That Shaped Human History A mineral you eat every day was once so rare, it was worth its weight in gold. Do you wish you lived back then? Think again. Wars were fought over it, people were enslaved to mine it, and thousands of people died without it. Is your salt shaker worth that much to you? Read it! Smore Magazine Summer 2022 |
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Her Place on the Horizon
A feminist slant on an Homeric homecoming, Her Place on the Horizon is a woman's journey through a world that has become unrecognizable, patching together the tattered pieces of the home she remembers into a future she can live in. Beryl Root, ocean ecowarrior and shipwreck survivor, returns to Oakland, CA, searching for home after 20 years away. But climate is changing the very meaning of home, now an epic written by Penelope, not Odysseus. This isn't the hero's journey of a brave warrior leaving home. Home is leaving us... House of Zolo's Journal of Speculative Lit, Volume 3: The Climate Change edition |
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Search and Rescue Kids
It was Day 9 of the search and the hiker still hadn’t been found. One of the largest wildfires in California’s history was raging near the place she’d last been seen in the remote mountain wilderness. Huge plumes of smoke blocked searching from the air. A Chinook helicopter struggled through the haze to land Search-and-Rescue (SAR) teams on the ground, the lost hiker’s best hope for rescue. Turns out they were lucky one searcher was a kid. Muse Magazine May/June 2019. |
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The Crease Yosemite rock climber Tara and Ice-Age Atzl seem to have a mysterious connection across time, a connection that may save more than one life. The Crease connects the Yosemite Valley of today with the valley of 13,000 years ago near the end of the ice age. Teacher Resources for The Crease include using Google Earth Pro to examine valleys formed by glaciers and valleys formed by other processes. Issues in Earth Science 12 (Nov 2019) - A Resource for Writers and Teachers (Ewww, there's geology in my fiction!) |
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Urban Kids in the Botanic Garden - California Native People and Plants
Not everyone has equal access to Nature. We developed the California Native People and Plants program to bring under-served urban fourth grade classrooms to the Regional Parks Botanic Garden to enjoy the popular hands-on Indian Uses of Native Plants tour. Human needs were met by native plants for thousands of years in California, before Target and Costco. Desert people, coast people, valley and mountain people... how did they have shoes? Snacks? A place to sleep? Manzanita 23(4), Fall 2019. |
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A Late Night on a High Wall
A thousand feet off the ground, on the vertical face of Half Dome and still hours away from the ledge where we could rest, my climbing buddy and I watched as the sun set and Yosemite Valley went pitch black. I had to lead us to that ledge, somewhere above us in the darkness. Alone on the wall, in the narrow beam of my headlamp, now it was just a struggle between me and my inner demon. Leading Out. Mountaineering Stories of Adventurous Women. Edited by Rachel DaSilva. |
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Conifer Exploits in California: A Perspective from 30 Stories Up
Who is the T-rex of trees? Who are the Olympic tree-athletes of the forest? The superlative world of conifers in California: their history, their relationship with humans, and the secret to the survival of giants. Told from the perspective of a researcher (me!) climbing a giant coastal redwood. Manzanita 16(4), Winter 2013. |