Amy Maxmen. Amy Maxmen, Ph.D., is an award-winning science writer who covers the entanglements of evolution, biomedicine, public health and of the people behind research. Maxmen is a senior reporter at Nature, and has also written for The New York Times, Wired, National Geographic, Newsweek, The Economist, and many other outlets. Selected works are on her website, amymaxmen.com.
Maxmen won the Victor Kohn Prize for Excellence in Medical Science Reporting in 2021 for her body of work covering COVID-19 and other diseases. Her 2019 feature on Ebola in the Democratic Republic of the Congo won a AAAS Kavli Science Journalism Award, and prizes from the Association of Health Care Journalists and the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene.
Her 2018 feature on drug-resistant malaria in Southeast Asia was awarded a first-place prize from the Association of Health Care Journalists, and her 2015 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.
Maxmen’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, she earned a doctorate in evolutionary biology from Harvard. Her doctoral work on sea spiders and the origin of arthropods was published in Nature. She lives in California.