About Me
In my former life, I was an astronomer. I latched on to that old Carl Sagan adage, ‘We are star dust’, and all my research aimed to trace the history of how that star dust came to be. This is the field of chemical evolution: tracing the production of the elements in the periodic table through all the generations of stars that formed since the beginning of the universe.
For most of my career, from my student-days onwards, my research was supported by public tax dollars in the form of fellowships from the US National Science Foundation. As a result, I’ve had a strong commitment to public outreach and education, and have given a lot of time and thought to how to communicate complex concepts in ways people at different expertise levels can understand.
Anyone whose work is supported by grant money can tell you how much writing the day-to-day job entails, and I always enjoyed this aspect of a scientific career. Now I help others communicate as effectively as possible. It’s not astrophysics, but I think there are parallels between my old research and the act of editing — examining the building blocks of a text, seeing how they come together as a whole, and evaluating how clear the resulting message is.
There is a science to writing well.
Education:
PhD, Astronomy (Indiana University, Bloomington)
BA, Astronomy (University of Texas at Austin)
Training:
Copyediting Certificate, UCSD Extension
I am a Professional Member of the Chartered Institute of Editing and Proofreading and abide by their Code of Practice. I live in Edinburgh, UK.
Entities I’ve edited for include The Public Domain Review, IOP Publishing, University of Arizona Press, and Oxford University Press.
CV available upon request.
