Maryn McKenna

Journalist, author and senior fellow at Emory University’s Center for the Study of Human Health

Twitter: @marynmck
Maryn McKenna is an independent journalist who specializes in public health, global health and food policy, and a Senior Fellow at the Center for the Study of Human Health at Emory University, where she teaches health and science writing and storytelling. She is a contributor to WIRED and author of the 2017 bestseller BIG CHICKEN: The Incredible Story of How Antibiotics Created Modern Agriculture and Changed the Way the World Eats, 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 (and is published in the UK and other territories under the title Plucked) as well as the award-winning books Superbug and Beating Back the Devil. She appears in the 2019 documentary Resistance Fighters, which won top prizes at the Vancouver and Paris film festivals, and the 2014 U.S. documentary Resistance, and her 2015 TED Talk, “What do we do when antibiotics don’t work any more?” has been viewed 1.8 million times and translated into 34 languages. She writes for The New York Times Magazine, WIRED, The New Republic, National Geographic, Mother Jones, Newsweek, NPR, Smithsonian, Scientific American, Slate, The Atlantic, Nature, and The Guardian, among other publications. She has received 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, among many other honors. In 2018, she was a Poynter Fellow in Journalism at Yale University; in 2013-2014, she was a Knight Science Journalism Fellow at MIT. She lives in Atlanta.