Ed Yong

Ed Yong is a Pulitzer-winning science journalist and the author of two bestselling books. For his coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic, Ed won the Pulitzer Prize in explanatory journalism; the George Polk Award for science reporting; the Benton Award for distinguished public service; the Victor Cohn Prize for medical science reporting, the Neil and Susan Sheehan Award for investigative journalism; the John P. McGovern Award from the American Medical Writers’ Association; and the AAAS Kavli Science Journalism Award for in-depth reporting. He was also a two-time finalist for the National Magazine Award in public service, and was described as “the most important and impactful journalist of 2020” by Poynter.

He is the author of two New York Times bestsellers: An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us and I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us and a Grander View of Life. An Immense World won the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction and the Royal Society Trivedi Science Book Prize; it was also ranked as one of the top books of the year by the New York Times, the New Yorker, the Wall Street Journal, Slate, the Economist, People, Barack Obama, and more than 30 other lists.

Ed was a staff writer at the Atlantic from 2015 to 2023. Prior to that, his writing also featured in National Geographic, the New Yorker, Wired, the New York Times, Nature, New Scientist, Scientific American, and other publications. He regularly does talks and interviews, and his TED talk on mind-controlling parasites has been watched by over 1.9 million people. His work has appeared in three editions of the Best American Science and Nature Writing anthology, which he then guest-edited in 2021.