Maryn McKenna, MSSenior Fellow in Health Narrative and Communication

Maryn McKenna is a journalist specializing in public health, global health and food policy. She is a contributing editor at Scientific American and has written for The New York Times Magazine, The New Republic, National Geographic, Mother Jones, Newsweek, NPR, Smithsonian, Scientific American, Slate, The Atlantic, Nature, and The Guardian, among other publications. From 2020-2023, she was a senior staff writer at WIRED leading their pandemic coverage. She is the author of BIG CHICKEN: The Incredible Story of How Antibiotics Created Modern Agriculture and Changed the Way the World Eats (National Geographic Books/PRH), which received the 2018 Science in Society Award and was named a best book of 2017 by Amazon, Smithsonian, Science News, Wired, Civil Eats, and other publications, as well as the award-winning books Superbug (Free Press/Simon & Schuster) and Beating Back the Devil (Free Press/Simon & Schuster). She has been anthologized in The Best American Science and Nature Writing (2023 and 2014), Weapons of Reason (2020), The Dirt: Dispatches from the Front Lines of Food and Farming (2018 and 2016), and The Best Science Writing Online (2012).

She appears in the Netflix + Vox Media documentaries "The Next Pandemic: Explained" and "Coronavirus: Explained"; the 2019 documentary Resistance Fighters, which won top prizes at the Vancouver and Paris film festivals; and the 2014 U.S. documentary Resistance. Her 2015 TED Talk, "What do we do when antibiotics don't work any more?" has been viewed more than 2 million times and translated into 34 languages. She has received the 2023 Victor M. Cohn Prize for Excellence in Medical Science Communication, the 2019 AAAS-Kavli Gold Award for magazine writing, the 2019 John P. McGovern Award for Excellence in Biomedical Communication, the 2014 Leadership Award of the Alliance for the Prudent Use of Antibiotics, and the 2013 Byron H. Waksman Award for Excellence in the Public Communication of Life Sciences. She also shared the AH Boerma Award from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, given to the “Future of Food” team at National Geographic, and was a finalist for a James Beard Foundation Media Award. She has held Knight Fellowships at the University of Michigan and MIT, and has been a Schuster Fellow at Brandeis University and a Poynter Fellow at Yale.

Ms. McKenna is a Senior Fellow in the Center for the Study of Human Health, where she teaches classes in writing and podcasting, gives workshops in narrative strategy and storytelling, and presents the Health Storytelling Author Q&A Series of interviews with prominent authors of new health-related books. She is interested in how narrative technique can enhance science communication, and in how the way we choose to tell stories about health can impart knowledge and inspire compassion.

• BA, Georgetown University 
• MS, Northwestern University 
• Post-graduate academic-year fellowships: University of Michigan, MIT 

• Public health
• Global health
• Emerging infections
• Antibiotic discovery and development
• Food policy
• Storytelling
• Narrative
• Science communication