Amy Maxmen is a science journalist in New York City who covers the entanglements of health, climate, policy and of the people behind research. Her stories appear in Nature, National Geographic and The New York Times, among other outlets. She is a contributing correspondent for KFF Health News.

Maxmen is renowned for her writing on epidemics. Judges of the 2021 Victor Cohn Prize for Excellence in Medical Science Reporting cited her “intrepid, rigorous, humane reporting that revealed the unequal toll of the pandemic by centering the voices and experiences of underserved communities.” Her feature on Covid among farmworkers in California won the Victor Cohn Prize, as well as the communications award from the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene (ASTMH), a Medical Journalists’ Association award, and a 2022 NIHCM Trade Journalism honorable mention.

In 2019, Maxmen covered Ebola in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, garnering a AAAS Kavli Science Journalism Award, a first-place prize from the Association of Health Care Journalists (AHCJ), and the communications award from ASTMH. Her feature on drug-resistant malaria in Southeast Asia received a first-place award in public health journalism from AHCJ, and her articles on the Ebola outbreak in Sierra Leone won the Science in Society Journalism Award from the National Association of Science Writers and the Bricker Award for Science Writing in Medicine. Maxmen’s feature on how Ethiopian archeologists are pushing back the clock on humanity’s origins is anthologized in The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2015. 

Maxmen was the 2022-2023 Edward R. Murrow press fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. She has been supported by multiple grants from the Pulitzer Center and a 2020 fellowship at the MIT Knight Science Journalism Program

Prior to writing, she earned a Ph.D. in evolutionary biology from Harvard by spending a great deal of time in the ocean and beside a microscope in Honolulu. Her doctoral work on sea spiders and the origin of arthropods was published in Nature. 

Twitter: @amymaxmen

All photos by Amy Maxmen