Amy Maxmen is an award-winning science writer who covers the entanglements of evolution, medicine, science policy and of the people behind research. Her stories appear in Wired, National Geographic and The New York Times, among other outlets. She’s currently based in California as a senior reporter at Nature.
Amy won the Victor Cohn Prize for Excellence in Medical Science Reporting in 2021 for her body of work covering COVID-19 and other diseases. Her feature on the toll of inequality in the pandemic also received the communications award from the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene (ASTMH) and a 2022 NIHCM Trade Journalism honorable mention. In 2019, her feature on Ebola in the Democratic Republic of the Congo won a AAAS Kavli Science Journalism Award, a first-place prize from the Association of Health Care Journalists (AHCJ), and a communications award from ASTMH. Her 2018 feature on drug-resistant malaria in Southeast Asia received a first-place award in public health journalism from AHCJ, and her coverage of the Ebola outbreak in Sierra Leone won a Science in Society Journalism Award from the National Association of Science Writers and the Bricker Award for Science Writing in Medicine. Amy’s feature on the origin of humanity in Ethiopia is anthologized in The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2015. Her work has been supported by the Pulitzer Center and a fellowship at the Knight Science Journalism Program at MIT.
Prior to writing, Amy 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