Author A–Z
SIGMA AUTHORS A–Z
Sue Armstrong
P53: The Gene that Cracked the Cancer Code Borrowed Time: How and Why We Age Sue Armstrong is a science writer and broadcaster based in Edinburgh. She has worked for a variety of media organisations, including New Scientist, and since the 1980s has undertaken regular assignments for the World Health Organization (WHO) and UNAIDS, writing about women’s health issues and the AIDS pandemic, among many other topics, and reporting from the frontline in countries as diverse as Haiti, Papua New Guinea, Uganda, Thailand, Namibia and Serbia. @armstrong_sue Edinburgh
Sue has been involved, as presenter, writer and researcher, in several major documentaries for BBC Radio 4; programmes have focused on the biology of ageing, and of drug addiction, AIDS, cancer and stress. P53 was shortlisted for the 2015 BMA Book Award.
Karin Bojs
My European Family: The First 54,000 Years Karin Bojs is an author and science journalist. Head of the science desk at Dagens Nyheter, the leading daily newspaper in Sweden, for nearly two decades, Karin has an honorary doctorate from Stockholm University, and has received several awards, including the 2015 Swedish August Prize for My European Family. She has published three other books, and has written articles on a broad range of topics in natural sciences. Her books have been translated into seven languages. Karin lives in Stockholm, but also has a country house where she grows vegetables, keeps bees, ferments cider, and maintains an orchid meadow. As a teenager she was trained as a baker, and still enjoys baking bread every week. My European Family publishes in June 2017
@KarinBojs Sweden
Borrowed Time publishes in January 2019
Kat Arney Herding Hemingway’s Cats: Understanding How Our Genes Work Following a doctorate and subsequent research career in genetics, Kat Arney went on to become Science Communications Manager for Cancer Research UK, where she translated science into plain English to help people understand more about the disease. Now a freelance science writer and broadcaster, Kat’s writing has appeared in the Guardian, Science, New Scientist, BBC Online and Al-Jazeera Online.
@harpistkat London
Kat regularly appears on national TV and radio shows, including Today, BBC Breakfast and GMTV, talking about the latest cancer research. She has presented several BBC Radio 4 science documentaries and programmes in the Costing the Earth series, is a regular presenter with the Naked Scientists, and presents and produces the Naked Genetics monthly podcast. Herding Hemingway’s Cats has been shortlisted for the 2016 MJA book Award.
Johnny Ball
Tales of Math and Legend: A History of All Things Mathematical A life-long maths obsessive, Johnny Ball started out as a Butlin’s redcoat and stand-up comic before appearing on BBC TV’s Play School from 1967. His real break, though, came in 1977, with the first series of Think of a Number, a tea-time popular maths show. A smash hit, this spawned various other shows (such as Johnny Ball Reveals All), as Johnny quickly became one of the most famous faces on British television. Johnny remains a regular fixture on TV and radio, and is comfortably Britain’s most famous mathematician. @JohnnyBallco London
Tales of Math and Legend publishes in June 2017
Rob Brotherton
Suspicious Minds: Why We Believe Conspiracy Theories Rob Brotherton is an academic psychologist and science writer who likes to walk on the weird side of psychology. Rob completed a doctoral degree on the psychology of conspiracy theories, and taught classes on why people believe weird stuff and science communication as a member of the Anomalistic Psychology Research Unit at Goldsmiths, University of London. Suspicious Minds was shortlisted for both the Phi Beta Kappa Award and the British Psychology Society Book Award, 2016. Rob writes about conspiracy theories on his website ConspiracyPsychology.com. @rob_brotherton New York
Catherine Carver Immune: The Killer Science Behind Your Body’s Defence System Catherine Carver completed her first degree in Natural Sciences at Cambridge before going on to study Medicine at the University of Aberdeen, which featured some time spent in Tanzania working with TB/HIV sufferers. After a period on the wards in the UK as a junior doctor, Catherine moved into public health, and joined the Wellcome Trust, running a portfolio of multimillion pound public health grants from all over the world. In 2012 she secured a Frank Knox Fellowship, and currently studies public health policy at Harvard University. Catherine is a seasoned science communicator, and has written blogs for The Lancet, Scientific American, Meducation and The Wellcome Trust, and she was shortlisted for the Guardian’s 2012 Science Writing Prize.
@ALittleGreyCell London
Immune publishes in August 2017
SIGMA AUTHORS A–Z
SIGMA AUTHORS A–Z
Kate Devlin
Alice Gregory
Kate Devlin is a lecturer at Goldsmiths, University of London. While completing her PhD in computer graphics and visual perception, Kate began to question the validity of the images that were created as archaeological reconstructions, and she started exploring the psychology and visual perception behind realistic image generation.
Alice Gregory is a highly respected expert on sleep throughout development, and sleep’s impact on anxiety and depression. She has been researching sleep for more than a decade and has published more than 100 articles on this and associated topics. She completed her undergraduate studies at the University of Oxford, her PhD at the Institute of Psychiatry, London, and recently took up a chair in psychology at Goldsmiths, University of London. Nodding Off, her first book, publishes in May 2018.
The Brightness of Things
Since publishing one of the first papers in the field in 2001, Kate has become a leading expert in archaeology and visual perception. The Brightness of Things publishes in September 2017 @drkatedevlin London
Nodding Off: Sleep from Cradle to Grave
Alice collaborates widely with other sleep experts throughout the world, and as a parent of two young children herself, she is well qualified to comment on this important topic. Nodding Off publishes in May 2018
Liam Drew
Timandra Harkness
Liam Drew is a neurobiologist and writer. He works as a Senior Research Associate at University College London on the neuroscience of pain, schizophrenia and the birth of new neurons in the adult brain. His research has appeared in numerous international journals including Science, Nature Neuroscience and Neuron.
Timandra Harkness is a writer, comedian and broadcaster, who has been performing on scientific, mathematical and statistical topics since the latter days of the 20th Century. She has written about travel for the Sunday Times, motoring for the Telegraph, science and technology for WIRED, BBC Focus Magazine and Men’s Health Magazine, and on being ‘Seduced by Stats’ for Significance (the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society).
I, Mammal: The Story of What Makes Us Mammals
Liam has also written about science – in Nature and Cell among other places – and for the general public in New Scientist, Slate and The Guardian. I, Mammal publishes in January 2018
Big Data: Does Size Matter?
She is a regular on BBC Radio, as a resident reporter on social psychology series The Human Zoo, as well as writing and presenting documentaries and BBC Radio 4’s FutureProofing series.
@liamjdrew London
@TimandraHarknes London
Matin Durrani
Furry Logic: The Physics of Animal Life Matin Durrani is editor of the international magazine Physics World, where he enjoys telling the stories that underpin physics and showing how it impacts so much of everyday life. Based in Bristol, he first became intrigued by how animals use physics after publishing a special issue of Physics World on the subject in 2012. Matin has a degree in chemical physics and did a PhD and postdoc squashing food gels at Cambridge University before moving into publishing.
@MatinDurrani Bristol
@ProfAMGregory London
Kathryn Harkup
A is for Arsenic: The Poisons of Agatha Christie Imperfect Animation: The Science of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein Kathryn Harkup is a chemist and author. She completed a PhD then a postdoc at the University of York before realising that talking, writing and demonstrating science appealed far more than spending hours slaving over a hot fume-hood. Kathryn went on to run outreach in engineering, computing, physics and maths at the University of Surrey, which involved writing talks on science and engineering topics that would appeal to bored teenagers, and she is now a science communicator delivering talks and workshops on the quirky side of science. A is for Arsenic has been shortlisted for 2016’s BMA Book Award and Macavity Award
@RotwangsRobot Surrey
Imperfect Animation publishes in February 2018
SIGMA AUTHORS A–Z
SIGMA AUTHORS A–Z
Brenna Hassett
Built on Bones: 15,000 Years of Urban Life and Death Brenna is an archaeologist who specializes in using clues from the human skeleton to understand how people lived and died in the past. Her research focuses on the evidence of health and growth locked into teeth, and she uses dental anthropological techniques to investigate how children grew (or didn’t) across the world and across time. She is also one-quarter of the TrowelBlazers project, an outreach, advocacy, and academic effort to celebrate women’s contributions to the trowel-wielding arts. Originally from the United States, she completed her Ph.D at University College, London, and has been based at London’s Natural History Museum since 2012. @brennawalks London
In his time, Tom has been a zoo keeper, travel writer, buffalo catcher and filing clerk, but he now writes for adults and children, for books, magazines and TV. @jinjatom Bristol
David Hone is rapidly becoming the ‘face’ of dinosaur research. Based at QMW in London, where he is Lecturer in Ecology, he has published more than 50 academic papers on dinosaur biology and behaviour, with a particular interest in the tyrannosaurs, while his fieldwork has included a spell working on the famous feathered dinosaur deposits of China. He writes a regular blog for the Guardian, Lost Worlds, a major source of dino-info for the general public.
Nicky Jenner is a freelance writer and editor. Her news stories, features, interviews and reviews have appeared in a variety of international popular science magazines, including New Scientist, Nature, BBC Sky at Night, Astronomy Now, The Times Eureka, and Physics World.
David includes among his writing credits the BBC’s Walking with Dinosaurs. He has appeared on the Discovery Channel, BBC Radio 5Live and RTE, acted as consultant for National Geographic documentaries, and written articles for New Scientist, The Times, The Independent, The Telegraph, New York Times, and many others.
Jules Howard is a zoologist, writer, blogger and broadcaster. He writes on a host of topics relating to zoology and wildlife conservation, and appears regularly in BBC Wildlife Magazine and on radio and TV, including on BBC’s The One Show, Nature and The Living World, Channel 5’s Sunday Brunch, as well as BBC Breakfast and Radio 4’s Today programme.
SIGMA AUTHORS A–Z
Tom Jackson is a science writer based in Bristol. Tom specialises in recasting science and technology into lively historical narratives. After almost 20 years of writing, Tom has uncovered a wealth of stories that help to bring technical content alive and create new ways of enjoying learning about science.
Nicky Jenner
Sex on Earth: A Journey Through Nature’s Most Intimate Moments Death on Earth: Adventures in Evolution and Mortality
Northants
Again)
David Hone
Jules Howard
@juleslhoward
Chilled: How Refrigeration Changed the World (and Might Do So
Built on Bones publishes in February 2017
The Tyrannosaur Chronicles: The Biology of the Tyrant Dinosaurs
@Dave_Hone London
Tom Jackson
Jules also runs a social enterprise that has brought almost 100,000 young people closer to the natural world. He lives in Northamptonshire with his wife and two children.
4th Rock from the Sun: The Story of Mars
Nicky is also a copywriter for the European Space Agency, European Southern Observatory (the organisation responsible for both the Very Large Telescope (VLT) and the upcoming European Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT), which will be the world’s largest eye on the sky), and the Hubble Space Telescope, for which she was formerly the European press officer. 4th Rock from the Sun publishes in April 2017
@nickyjenner1 Hong Kong & London
Tom Lean Electronic Dreams: How 1980s Britain Learned to Love the Computer A historian of science currently based at the British Library, Tom Lean works on Oral History of British Science, a major project concerned with collecting and archiving life-story interviews with 100 figures from the recent history of science and technology. Tom’s fascination with computer technology is long-standing, with this culminating in his doctorate at the University of Manchester on popular computing in 1980s Britain.
@reggitsti Manchester
SIGMA AUTHORS A–Z
Jack Lewis
Helen Pilcher
Jack Lewis is a neurobiologist and television presenter. Following a doctorate at UCL, Jack became a regular on ITV’s This Morning. He has gone on to present shows on psychology for the BBC, Channel 4, Sky and The Discovery Channel, and a three-part ITV series called How to Get More Sex.
Helen Pilcher is a tea-drinking, biscuit-nibbling science and comedy writer, with a PhD in Cell Biology from London’s Institute of Psychiatry. A former reporter for Nature, she now specializes in biology, medicine and quirky off-the-wall science, and writes for outlets including New Scientist and BBC Focus.
Jack’s previous book was the award-winning Sort Your Brain Out.
Unusually for a self-proclaimed geek, Helen also used to be a stand-up comedian before the arrival of children meant she couldn’t physically stay awake past 9pm. She now gigs from time to time, and lives in rural Warwickshire.
The Science of Sin
The Science of Sin publishes in November 2017
Bring Back the King: The New Science of De-extinction
@DrJackLewis London
@HelenPilcher1 Warwickshire
Kathryn Lougheed
Vanessa Potter
The Robber of Youth: Tuberculosis Past, Present and Future
Patient H69: The Story of My Second Sight
Kathryn Lougheed worked in tuberculosis research for more than ten years, focusing on the biological mechanisms of latent tuberculosis and small molecule drug discovery. She completed her PhD at Imperial College London in 2006, before moving to the National Institute for Medical Research, where she collaborated with industrial partners to develop inhibitors targeted against Mycobacterium tuberculosis, followed by further research at Imperial.
Vanessa Potter spent 16 years as an award-winning broadcast producer in London’s advertising industry, before fate one day conspired to turn the lights out on her. Suddenly losing then slowly regaining her sight led Vanessa to change direction, turning the camera upon herself to tell her story via immersive art and storytelling.
During her academic career, Kat published dozens of peer-reviewed papers and was an active member of the tuberculosis research community. @ilovebacteria London
Australia
The Robber of Youth publishes in June 2017
Her collaborations have led to some exciting partnerships, and she is currently working on developing an interactive EEG science-art project that allows the public to see and understand the effects of mindfulness on their brains. She is also involved in several other scientific research projects. Her speaking engagements included a TEDx talk in Ghent, Belgium in June 2016. Patient H69 publishes in May 2017
Patrick Nunn
Louisa Preston
The Edge of Memory: The Geology of Folk Tales and Climate Change
Goldilocks and the Water Bears: The Search for Life in the Universe
Patrick Nunn received his PhD from the University of London before spending 25 years teaching and researching at the international University of the South Pacific, based in Fiji, where he was appointed Professor of Oceanic Geoscience in 1996. He moved to Australia in 2010 to work at the University of New England before taking up a research chair in March 2014 in the Sustainability Research Centre at the University of the Sunshine Coast.
Louisa Preston is an astrobiologist, planetary geologist and unashamed lover of water bears. Her research focuses on places on Earth in which life is able to survive despite extreme conditions; such habitats provide clues on what alien life-forms might look like, and where we should search for them.
Patrick has more than 230 peer-reviewed publications to his credit, including several books, including Vanished Islands and Hidden Continents of the Pacific (University of Hawai’i Press), which was named by the American Library Association as one of the Best of the Best from the University Presses in 2009.
Having worked on projects for NASA and the Canadian, European and UK Space Agencies, the only thing Louisa enjoys more than devising ways to find extra-terrestrial life is writing and talking about it. She has published numerous articles and academic papers, and regularly appears on radio and television shows, such as the BBC’s The Sky at Night. She is a TED fellow, and spoke about the search for life on Mars at the 2013 TED Conference.
@PatientH69 London
@LouisaJPreston Kent
The Edge of Memory publishes in November 2018
SIGMA AUTHORS A–Z
SIGMA AUTHORS A–Z
Helen Scales
Spirals in Time: The Secret Life and Curious Afterlife of Seashells From the Eye of the Shoal: A Fish-watcher’s Guide to Life, the Ocean
and Everything
Helen Scales is a marine biologist based in Cambridge, England. Her doctorate involved searching for giant, endangered fish in Borneo; she’s also tagged sharks in California, and once spent a year cataloguing all the marine life she could find surrounding a hundred islands in the Andaman Sea. @helenscales Cambridgeshire
Helen is now a freelance researcher and broadcaster; she appears regularly on BBC Radio 4, Sky News and the BBC World Service, and has presented documentaries on topics such as whether people will ever live underwater, the science of making and surfing waves and the intricacies of sharks’ minds.
David Sumpter Soccermatics: Mathematical Adventures in the Beautiful Game David Sumpter is Professor of Applied Mathematics at the University of Uppsala, Sweden, where he runs the Collective Behaviour Research Group. Originally from London, he studied his PhD in Mathematics at Manchester and held academic research positions at both Oxford and Cambridge before heading to Sweden, where he lives with his wife and two children. In his spare time, he trains a successful 9-year old boys’ football team, Upsala IF 2005. An incomplete list of the research projects on which David has worked include pigeons flying in pairs over Oxford; clapping undergraduate students in the north of England; fish swimming between coral in the Great Barrier Reef; swarms of locusts traveling across the Sahara; disease-spread in Ugandan villages; the gaze of London commuters; and the tubular structures built by Japanese slime moulds.
@djsumpter Sweden
From the Eye of the Shoal publishes in February 2018
Pía Spry-Marqués
Rebecca Wragg Sykes
Pía Spry-Marqués is a research associate at the University of Cambridge. A zooarchaeologist at the McDonald Institute, her research has taken her across Europe and across time, from the late Iron Age back to the Ice Ages, identifying, classifying and decoding the meaning of animal remains in human-associated deposits.
Becky Wragg Sykes has been fascinated by the vanished worlds of the Pleistocene ice ages since childhood, and followed this interest through a career researching the most enigmatic characters of all, the Neanderthals. After a PhD on the last Neanderthals living in Britain, she worked in France at the world-famous PACEA laboratory, Université de Bordeaux, looking at Neanderthal landscapes and territories in the Massif Central of south-east France.
PIG/PORK: Archaeology, Zoology and Edibility
Originally from Spain, Pía is predisposed to a keen understanding, awareness and love of the pig, and the many tasty pork products that are so much a part of Spanish cuisine. PIG/PORK publishes in July 2017 @zooarcher Cambridgeshire
Beyond the Ice: The Neanderthal Story
Becky is passionate about sharing the privileged access scientists have to fascinating discoveries about the Neanderthals. She frequently writes for the popular media, including the Scientific American and Guardian science blogs, and is co-founder of the influential Trowelblazers project, which highlights women archaeologists, palaeontologists and geologists through innovative outreach and collaboration.
@LeMoustier France & Manchester
Beyond the Ice publishes in June 2018
Natalie Starkey Catching Stardust: Comets, Asteroids and the Birth of the Solar System Natalie Starkey has been actively involved in space science research for more than 10 years. Following a Ph.D. in Geochemistry at the University of Edinburgh, Natalie moved to the Open University, where her research focused on laboratory analysis of cometary and asteroid rock samples. This allowed her the opportunity to be involved in sample-return space missions, such as NASA Stardust and JAXA Hayabusa, and she was invited to be a co-investigator on one of the instrument teams for the groundbreaking ESA Rosetta comet mission. @StarkeyStardust California
Now living in California, Natalie regularly appears on television and radio internationally. She has written articles for The Guardian, and she regularly contributes to The Conversation website. In 2014 she received a SEPnet award for Public Engagement in the Media and Communications category.
Elizabeth Tasker
The Planet Factory: Exoplanets and the Search for a Second Earth Elizabeth Tasker is an astrophysicist specialising in computational simulations of star formation in galaxies. After a degree in theoretical physics, she went on to complete her doctorate at Oxford before post-doctoral research at Columbia University and the University of Florida in the United States, and McMaster University in Canada. In 2011 she became an assistant professor at Hokkaido University, Japan. Elizabeth has been a keen science communicator for many years, dating back to winning the Daily Telegraph Young Science Writers Award in 1999. Since then she has written blogs for Scientific American and Physics Focus, and currently writes Hokkaido University’s research blog. The Planet Factory publishes in October 2017
@girlandkat Japan
Catching Stardust publishes in April 2018
SIGMA AUTHORS A–Z
SIGMA AUTHORS A–Z
Amy Shira Teitel
Laurie Winkless
Breaking the Chains of Gravity: The Story of Spaceflight before NASA
Science and the City: The Mechanics Behind the Metropolis
Beneath Apollo: How Risk, Failure and Imagination put Men on the Moon
Laurie Winkless is a physicist and writer, currently based in London. Following a degree at Trinity College Dublin, a placement at NASA’s Kennedy Space Centre, and a masters in Space Science at UCL, Laurie worked at the National Physical Laboratory, specialising in materials. Thermoelectric energy harvesting – where heat is captured and converted into electricity – was her bag, and remains a favourite topic of conversation.
Amy Shira Teitel is a lifelong space-history nerd who has turned her schoolgirl fascination with the Apollo missions into a career researching the minutiae of spaceflight’s history.
@astVintageSpace California
Amy started writing for the public with her blog, Vintage Space. She runs a thriving YouTube channel (also called Vintage Space), has appeared on the Discovery channel, the Military channel, SyFy, and the Science channel, and is a host on DNews, Discovery Channel’s online daily news show. Amy was also an embedded journalist on the New Horizons team, bringing the excitement of humanity’s first mission to Pluto to the space-loving public.
Laurie has been communicating science to the public for more than a decade, working with schools and universities, the Royal Society, Forbes, and the Naked Scientists, among others. She’s given TEDx talks, hung out with astronauts, and appeared in The Times magazine as a leading light in STEM.
@laurie_winkless London
Beneath Apollo publishes in June 2019
Nicola Temple
Chris Woodford
Sorting the Beef from the Bull: The Science of Food Fraud Forensics No Added Sugar: The Evolution of Food Processing
Atoms Under the Floorboards: The Surprising Science Hidden in
Nicola Temple is a biologist, conservationist and science writer. Based in Bristol, Nicola works with universities, research councils and individuals to develop engaging science stories on how research has an impact beyond the closeted world of academia.
Chris Woodford has been a professional science and technology writer for 25 years. After graduating from Cambridge University with a degree in natural sciences, he has gone on to write, co-write and edit a number of science education books, including the best-selling Cool Stuff series.
Nicola’s first book, co-written with Professor Richard Evershed, revealed the full story of forensic science’s war against food fraud.
Your Home
He runs www.explainthatstuff.com, dedicated to explaining the science behind familiar, everyday things.
@nicolatemple Bristol
Portsmouth
James R. Valcourt
Systematic: How Systems Biology Is Transforming Modern Medicine James R. Valcourt is pursuing a Ph.D. in biology at Harvard University. A former researcher at D. E. Shaw Research in New York City working on drug discoveries using supercomputer simulations to study cellular receptors, he was also a recipient of the quarter-million-dollar John and Fannie Hertz Foundation Graduate Fellowship. He graduated magna cum laude from Princeton University with an A.B. in molecular biology, receiving the M. Taylor Pyne Honor Prize.
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Massachusetts
SIGMA AUTHORS A–Z
SIGMA AUTHORS A–Z