I'm a data, science, and investigative reporter based in San Francisco.

I also teach investigative and policy reporting, data visualization, and news feature writing in the Science Communication Program at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and have taught data visualization in the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley. I have run training in data analysis and visualization for the Berkeley Advanced Media Institute and I am available to provide training for newsrooms and other professionals.

I got my break in journalism in 1989 as a reporter for Nature in London, fresh from a PhD in animal behavior. Later I worked as European correspondent for Science, news editor for New Scientist, and chief news & features editor with Nature, before moving to California in 2005 to become New Scientist's San Francisco bureau chief. From 2015 to 2022 I worked on the science desk at BuzzFeed News.

My articles have won awards from the Association of British Science Writers, the Association of Health Care Journalists, the UK Guild of Health Writers, the Society of Environmental Journalists, the Royal Statistical Society, and the Wistar Institute.

My maps of U.S. government surveillance flights were named data visualization of the year in the Global Editors Network's 2016 Data Journalism Awards; that project also won gold for data journalism and the overall Most Beautiful prize in the 2016 Kantar Information is Beautiful Awards. A follow-up project, which used machine learning to identify further covert spy planes, won the JSK Fellowships award for innovation in GEN's 2018 Data Journalism Awards. And I was a finalist in the Online category of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine 2019 Communication Awards for my data-driven coverage of wildfires.