Maryn McKenna

Senior science writer

Maryn McKenna is a senior writer at WIRED, where she covers public health and global health, 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 the recipient of the 2023 Victor Cohn Prize for Excellence in Medical Science Reporting, a career award, and the 2019 AAAS-Kavli Gold Award for magazine writing for her piece “The Plague Years” in The New Republic (featured on Showcase), among many other honors. She is the 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 as well as the award-winning books Superbug and Beating Back the Devil. She was a 2018 Poynter Fellow in Journalism at Yale University and a Knight Foundation science journalism fellow at MIT and the University of Michigan.