I was born in New York on Feb. 16, 1958. I attended the University of Michigan for my first two years of college and then transferred to Barnard College in New York, from which I graduated with high honors in 1978. While in college, I studied English, physics and astronomy and dreamed of starting a popular magazine about science for intelligent lay readers who wanted to know more about what's going on across the great divide of C.P. Snow's two cultures. Instead, at the age of 22, I was hired as a founding staff member for the science magazine that Time Inc. launched in 1980, Discover magazine. During my four years there, I specialized in writing about biology.
I've also worked as the science writer for Time magazine, an editor at the now-defunct women's magazine, Savvy, and a professor at the New York University's Graduate Program in Science and Environmental Reporting. I have written for the Atlantic, Parade, Washington Monthly, Reader's Digest, Fox Television Network, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, most of the major women's magazines and many other publications.
My first book, "Natural Obsessions," an inside look at the high-throttle world of cancer research, was published by Houghton Mifflin in 1988 and was named a notable book of the year by the New York Times and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).
In 1990, I began working for the New York Times, and the next year I won a Pulitzer prize, for beat reporting. The submission to the Pulitzer committee consisted of ten features I'd written on a variety of topics, including scorpions, sexual infidelity in the animal kingdom, the Human Genome Project and the molecular biology of the cell cycle.
I have also won numerous other awards, among them the AAAS award for excellence in journalism, the Lewis Thomas Award for distinguished writing in the life sciences, the General Motors International award for writing about cancer, and the Barnard Distinguished Alumna award. The Forbes MediaGuide, an appraisal of 500 U.S. journalists, included me among the seven journalists awarded its top rating of four stars.
My most recent book, "The Beauty of the Beastly," a hymn to the multitudinous, mostly invertebrate creatures we'd rather forget, was published in 1995 by Houghton Mifflin. It was cited as one of the notable science books of the year by the New York Times and Library Journal, and it has been translated into five languages. I'm currently working on another book, a celebration of the female body.
I live in Takoma Park, Md., with my husband, Rick Weiss, who covers science for the Washington Post, and my daughter, Katherine Weiss Angier.