Maryn McKenna

Maryn McKenna is a journalist and author who specializes in public health, global health and food policy.

She has reported from epidemics and disasters, and farms and food production sites, on most of the continents, including a field hospital in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina, a Thai village erased by the Indian Ocean tsunami, a bird-testing unit on the front lines of West Nile virus, an Arctic graveyard of the victims of the 1918 flu, an AIDS treatment center in Yunnan, a polio-eradication team in India, breweries in France, a “Matrix for chickens” in the Netherlands, and the Midwestern farms devastated by the 2015 epidemic of avian flu.

She writes about science and food for The New York Times Magazine, National Geographic, NPR, Newsweek, Vice, FiveThirtyEight, Wired, Scientific American, Slate, Modern Farmer, Nature, The Atlantic, and The Guardian. She is the author of the award-winning books SUPERBUG and BEATING BACK THE DEVIL, and is a Senior Fellow of the Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism at Brandeis University and a frequent radio guest. Her 2015 TED talk, "What do we do when antibiotics don't work any more?", has been viewed more than 1.5 million times.