Writers

Natalie Wolchover

Senior editor

Natalie Wolchover is a senior editor at Quanta Magazine covering the physical sciences. She has won several awards for her writing, including the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in Explanatory Reporting for “The Webb Space Telescope Will Rewrite Cosmic History. If It Works,” featured on Showcase, and CASW’s 2016 Evert Clark/Seth Payne Award for Young Science Journalists for a set of articles including “A Fight for the Soul of Science” and “Visions of Future Physics” (both also featured on Showcase). Wolchover studied physics at Tufts University and briefly at the University of California, Berkeley, before dropping out to become a science journalist. In 2023, she ran the Institute for Advanced Study’s first Science Journalism Workshop, which brought a talented international cohort of early-career science journalists to Princeton for a week of intense training. Wolchover lives in Queens, New York, with her wife and daughter. She is currently hard at work on her first book, about the search for the unified theory of nature.

Eva Wolfangel

Science Journalist

Eva Wolfangel is a German science journalist, focusing on future technologies such as artificial intelligence and virtual reality, computer science, data journalism, interaction between digital and real worlds, and space travel. She writes for major magazines and newspapers in Germany and Switzerland — including ZEIT, Geo, Spiegel and NZZ — and produces radio features. As a VR reporter, she reports from virtual worlds as part of the journalistic cooperative RiffReporter. After several years as an editor, she became a freelance journalist in 2008. Eva’s specialty is to combine creative writing and technical topics in order to reach a broad audience. In 2018 she was named European Science Writer of the Year by the Association of British Science Writers. Her story, “Who Was That?” (featured on Showcase), is one of the many stories that received that award. Currently she is a Knight Science Journalism Fellow at MIT. (Photo by Helena Ebel.)

Ed Yong

Science Writer

Ed Yong is a science journalist who reports for The Atlantic and is based in Washington, DC. His work has featured in National Geographic, The New Yorker, Wired, and more. He has won a variety of awards, including the National Academies Keck Science Communication Award. I Contain Multitudes, his first book, became a New York Times bestseller and inspired an online film series, an anthology of plays, and a clue on Jeopardy. He has a Chatham Island black robin named after him. Follow him on Twitter @edyong209.

His story “North Atlantic Right Whales Are Dying in Horrific Ways” is featured on Showcase as a Storygram. 

Mariano Zafra

Graphics Editor

Mariano Zafra is a senior graphics editor at Reuters Graphics, where he contributes to one of the most awarded teams in the world. Prior to this, from 2019 to 2023, he led the graphic and storytelling team at El País in Madrid. Before that, he spent four years as a graphics reporter for special projects at The Wall Street Journal and started and led the Infographic and Data Visualization Department of Univision News in Miami. Before moving to the United States, Zafra dedicated 14 years to working at two of the most prominent national daily newspapers in Spain: El Mundo and El País.

His work has been recognized with the AAAS Kavli Science Journalism Award (2021), the Ortega y Gasset Journalism Award (2021), and “The Best of Show” at the Malofiej Infographics Awards for the globally recognized visual article “A room, a bar and a classroom: how the coronavirus is spread through the air” (featured on Showcase). He has also won more than 40 international awards, including honors from the Society for News Design, NH, and Malofiej.