Lauren grew up scrambling around the sun-drenched hillsides of northern California, climbing old oaks, looking for rusty treasures and catching tadpoles in the creek behind her house. Through elementary school and junior high, she suffered from the overwhelming desire to be a goody-two-shoes but more often ended up getting into trouble for reading novels when she was supposed to be paying attention in class. Since graduating, however, both the hillside wandering and the insatiable need to read have served her well. 

She's the frighteningly balanced product of her parents: Her mother was an English major at UC Berkeley, her father a biochemistry PhD who studied epidemiology and toxic-risk assessment. Unable to decide between writing and science, she chose them both. In college, she read Shakespeare and Ovid while hopping among a variety of science labs and research projects. She studied parrot cognition with Irene Pepperberg and Alex the African grey, tracked a golden eagle fledgeling through California's East Bay Regional Parks system, and grew her own Silene latifolia seedlings to study the effects of nighttime versus daytime pollinators.

Now as a science, medical and environmental  journalist, she gets to talk about all sorts of interesting research with all kinds of interesting people. Not a bad gig, if you can get it.



Click here for her full resume.