Amy Maxmen

Maxmen is an award-winning science reporter based in New York City. Her bylines appear in the New York Times, Nature, and the Washington Post, among many other outlets. She is currently a public health reporter at KFF Health News. Maxmen's feature on Covid among farmworkers in California won the 2021 Victor Cohn Prize for Excellence in Medical Science Reporting, with judges citing my “intrepid, rigorous, humane reporting that revealed the unequal toll of the pandemic by centering the voices and experiences of underserved communities.” In 2019, Maxmen covered Ebola in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, garnering a AAAS Kavli Science Journalism Award, a first-place prize from the Association of Health Care Journalists (AHCJ) and the communications award from the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene. Her feature on drug-resistant malaria in Southeast Asia received a first-place award in public health journalism from AHCJ, and my articles on the Ebola outbreak in Sierra Leone won the Science in Society Journalism Award from the National Association of Science Writers and the Bricker Award. Maxmen's feature on how Ethiopian archeologists are pushing back the clock on humanity’s origins is anthologized in The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2015. None of this work would have been possible without talented and kind editors, and much of it had support from the Pulitzer Center, an MIT Knight Science Journalism fellowship in 2020 and an Edward R. Murrow Press Fellowship from the Council on Foreign Relations in 2022-23. Maxmen has a Ph.D. in evolutionary biology from Harvard University, where she published her doctoral work on the evolution of arthropods in Nature in 2006.